10 Best Presales Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 23 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
With so many different presales software available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to help your presales teams prepare for and manage customer engagements effectively 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 presales tools with various teams and prospects, with my picks of the best presales software.
What Is Presales Software?
Presales software is a business tool that supports the early stages of the sales cycle, including activities like lead qualification, solution development, and proposal creation. It equips presales teams with functionalities for managing potential leads, automating proposal generation, and configuring products or services to meet client needs. This software integrates with customer relationship management systems and offers collaboration and communication tools, streamlining the preparatory phase before actual sales begin.
The benefits of presales software include improved efficiency in identifying and prioritizing high-quality leads, leading to a more focused and effective sales approach. It simplifies the process of creating customized proposals, saving time and resources. By facilitating better understanding and tailoring of solutions to client needs, the software enhances the potential for successful sales outcomes. Additionally, it promotes collaboration among team members and provides data-driven insights, aiding in strategic decision-making and increasing overall sales productivity.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Presales Software
When you jump into these overviews, you can expect to see a brief summary of the platform, its standout features, a few of the most popular integrations, and a snapshot of the tool’s inner workings. I’ve also included a few pros and cons that can help you narrow down the right tool for your needs more quickly.
CRM Creatio is a comprehensive customer relationship management platform designed to automate and improve customer engagement and revenue processes. It offers a unified experience with no-code customization, allowing users to personalize workflows to meet their specific needs.
Why I picked CRM Creatio: I chose CRM Creatio because it offers a 360-degree customer view, which is really helpful for presales. This feature lets your team dive into customer interactions and histories, giving you a clear picture of what clients need and how they've engaged with your company in the past. It's a great way to understand client needs and predict future requests, so your team can be more proactive and prepared.
Standout features include workflow automation, KPI monitoring tools, collaboration tools, reporting and analytics, lead and opportunity management, marketing automation, and order management.
Integrations include Accelo, Act!, ActiveCampaign, Acumatica, Adobe Analytics, Asana, Microsoft Exchange, Excel, Mailchimp, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Google Calendar, and Tableau.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- No-code platform
- Comprehensive view of customers
- Scalable for businesses of different sizes
Cons:
- Customization can be time-consuming
- Data migration may be complex
Dock is a B2B sales and customer onboarding software that centralizes client interactions within a branded workspace, aiming to enhance collaboration and improve the buyer experience.
Why I picked Dock: I picked Dock for its digital sales rooms, which are customizable workspaces that facilitate collaboration between your sales teams and prospects. These workspaces centralize all necessary information, making it accessible in one place. This not only improves your team's alignment but also enhances the buyer's experience, which is particularly beneficial for managing complex sales processes and ensuring that all stakeholders are on the same page.
Standout features include buying signals, dynamic action plans, a flexible workspace editor, custom branding, pricing and order forms, secure sharing, digital signature collection, and customizable templates.
Integrations include Airtable, Pandadoc, Typeform, HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, and Zoom.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Templates for standardizing processes
- Mutual action plans
- Analytics for customer engagement
Cons:
- Salesforce integration only available for higher tiers
- Learning curve for new users wanting to maximize the features
HubSpot is a customer platform that offers a wide range of marketing, sales, customer service, and content management tools. Overall, HubSpot aims to help businesses generate more leads and prioritize growth and success in a competitive market through its customer-centric approach and all-in-one solution for marketing, sales, and customer service.
Why I picked HubSpot: HubSpot is a comprehensive solution for presales software, providing a range of capabilities and services to support the sales process and drive success in sales and marketing efforts. The platform also provides valuable insights into customer behavior, sales trends, and areas for improvement, enabling data-driven decisions and continuous optimization of sales approaches. HubSpot emphasizes the importance of establishing a robust sales operations plan and focuses on building meaningful connections with customers based on trust and understanding.
Standout features include email communication, appointment scheduling, and automated email sequences, as well as lead nurturing, email automation, prospecting, and lead qualification.
Integrations include Slack, Eventbrite, Jira, Asana, Outlook, SurveyMonkey, Canva, Make, Supermetrics, and Mailchimp.
Pricing One-Liner: From $45/user/month
Free Trial One-Liner: 14-day free trial + free plan available
PROS
Responsive customer support services
Excellent marketing features
Helps businesses grow by attracting customers
CONS
Lacks API capabilities
Some issues with email deliverability
Best for qualifying, routing, and scheduling leads from anywhere
Built to be a meeting lifecycle automation platform, Chili Piper helps your revenue operations team connect with potential customers faster through automated qualifying, routing, and scheduling that integrates and syncs directly with your CRM, campaigns, G2 page, web form, or cold calls.
Why I picked Chili Piper: This tool was an essential addition to my list because of a feature called Handoff. With Handoff, sales teams with SDRs and AEs can connect buyers with reps right away — whether you need to use location and company size rules-based routing or you simply want to ensure fairness through round-robin routing.
Chili Piper Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include Concierge, which allows sales reps to qualify leads directly from your web form, and Instant Booker to schedule one-click meetings with prospects.
Integrations include Act-On, Candu, Chameleon, Drift, G2, HubSpot, LeadPages, Marketo, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce.
Pricing One-Liner: From $22.50/user/month
Free Trial One-Liner: Free demo available
PROS
Easy to set up and use
Intuitive navigation and learning process
Responsive customer service team
CONS
Integrations can be complex to set up
Some issues with time zone scheduling
Best for building seller knowledge and encouraging winning behaviors
This sales enablement platform is built to help sales managers and reps track everything they need to know about products and services with key learning skills, coaching, and career updates. Ensure sales readiness when you integrate with other online training tools to develop a comprehensive training platform that standardizes product knowledge.
Why I picked MindTickle: This tool looks like a very useful presales software option because you can measure the impact of individualized training through mapping to revenue to see outcomes. Understand which specific skills are driving the results you want and apply them across your entire organization.
MindTickle Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include AI-driven skills reinforcement and practice exercises and seller-centric enablement programs that are personalized to each sales rep.
Integrations include Aircall, Cognota, Go1, IBM Cloud, Mediafly, Okta, Salesforce, SAML, Seismic, and Veeva.
Pricing One-Liner: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial One-Liner: Free demo is available
PROS
Consistent updates and product improvement
Offers out-of-the-box modules and templates
Easy user interface design
CONS
Analytics and reporting is a little basic
No heat map data visualization
Sendoso
Best for integrating tech, data, and logistics on a global scale
With direct email automation, worldwide fulfillment and inventory management, seamless integrations, and intelligent analytics, Sendoso is designed to enable any organization to streamline account-based marketing and enhance the customer experience from one unified platform.
Why I picked Sendoso: This presales platform made my list because it offers intelligent sending that targets key people and accounts with personalized direct messages that address their needs. Whether you’re choosing a gift yourself or asking the experts at Sendoso to do it for you, this platform delivers a unique way to connect with buyers.
Sendoso Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include worldwide logistics to store and manage inventory and a globally curated marketplace that allows you to send physical gifts, branded merchandise, e-gifts, virtual experiences, or philanthropy.
Integrations include 6Sense, Accelerate Media, ActiveCampaign, Base.ai, Bombara, Calendly, Enboarder, Groove, HubSpot, and Microsoft Azure.
Pricing One-Liner: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial One-Liner: Free demo available
PROS
Very user friendly platform
Amazing customer support team
Easy to navigate the platform
CONS
Onboarding can be a little challenging
No editing an order after submission
Visit WebsiteOpens new window
Walkme is a digital adoption platform (DAP) that sits on your tech stack to provide you with visibility into your team’s software usage at every level. With this platform, you get a people-first experience that strives to ensure a frictionless experience across every app and workflow to improve adoption, reduce risk, and enhance employee engagement.
Why I picked Walkme: The feature that stood out to me the most here is the Change Management tool. With Change Management, you can create and implement a digital adoption plan for new software with guides, reminders, and encouragement to ensure your team is using new software.
Walkme Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include Walkme AI for AI-driven recommendations and auto-generated user experiences, as well as cross-system automation to drive product adoption.
Integrations include AlayaCare, Google Analytics, Intercom, LiveAgent, Okta, Olark, Salesforce, Segment, Slack, and Zendesk Suite.
Pricing One-Liner: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial One-Liner: Free demo available
PROS
No need to be tech savvy
Encourages a DIY mentality
User interface is easy to use
CONS
Not as scalable for user customizations
Some glitches that require refreshing
As a global leader in sales enablement, Seismic offers a variety of tools to help your business engage with customers and close more deals. Seismic offers robust presales tools through its Strategy & Planning product, which focuses on creating a purpose-built planning, reporting, and auditing hub for your team.
Why I picked Seismic: This tool caught my eye because it offers intelligent content auditing to help you decide which content to keep, update, or archive based on performance data and analytics. See which playbooks, scripts, and communications work best and streamline your content workflows to ensure best practices throughout your entire organization.
Seismic Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include planning impact reporting for actionable insights into how time and effort are impacting your revenue and capacity planning to triage new requests with burndown charts and timelines.
Integrations include Box, Dropbox Business, Gmail, Google Drive, Jira, Microsoft 365, Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, Slack, and WordPress.
Pricing One-Liner: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial One-Liner: Free demo is available
PROS
Easy to understand the data
Platform is very user friendly
Provides a single source of truth
CONS
Limited sharing of digital salesrooms
Does require some admin and upkeep
As a cloud-based demo platform, Storylane focuses on helping businesses of all sizes optimize sales enablement through customized product demonstrations. With personalized, automated demo creation, you can create a demo, edit without any coding required, include interactive guides, publish your content, or share it via a link.
Why I picked Storylane: The reason this platform caught my attention was due to how easy their demo building tool was to use. Their editor requires no coding and allows you to click directly into the content to edit text, blur sensitive data, embed images, change graphs, and add charts.
Storylane Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include demo engagement tracking that allows you to clone successes and an AI demo builder assistant that can improve and translate guides into 25 languages.
Integrations include Google Analytics, HubSpot, Intercom, Marketo Engage, Microsoft Dynamics, Pardot, Salesforce, Segment, Slack, and Zapier.
Pricing One-Liner: From $50/user/month
Free Trial One-Liner: Free plan available
PROS
Very easy to use
Focuses on streamlining demo creation
Has a free plan option
CONS
HTML editing can be a little tricky
Some technical bugs and glitches
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that strives to provide you with a deep and accurate understanding of every customer interaction. With the data to make better business decisions, you can improve efficiency, customer experiences, and product design. Gong uses proprietary AI technology to analyze customer interactions for more successful outcomes.
Why I picked Gong: The reason this platform stood out to me was its collaborative forecasting, which uses AI and data-backed pipeline inspection. You don’t have to rely on sales rep notes to get alerts about new risks to a deal, so you can respond faster with solutions to upcoming issues. Gong will tell you exactly what the issue is so you can deal with it in the right way.
Gong Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include Gong Insights to enrich critical reports, Gong AI to customize automation and guidance, and forecasting tools to catch unseen risks to deals.
Integrations include Gainsight, Highspot, HubSpot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Outreach, Salesforce, Slack, Vidyard, Workato, and Zoom.
Pricing One-Liner: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial One-Liner: Free demo is available
PROS
Easy to use the platform
Very accurate voice transcription
Intuitive to navigate dashboard and tools
CONS
Takes notes in third person
Limited digital training materials
Tools | Price | |
---|---|---|
CRM Creatio | From $25/user/month | Website |
Dock | From $49/user/month | Website |
HubSpot | From $15/month (billed annually) | Website |
Chili Piper | From $30/user/month + $150 platform fee | Website |
MindTickle | Pricing starts from $20/user/month. | Website |
Sendoso | Available upon request | Website |
WalkMe | From $2-3000/annually | Website |
Seismic | Pricing upon request | Website |
Storylane | From $50/user/month | Website |
Gong | Pricing upon request | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Options
My list wouldn’t be complete without a few of these other presales software options. Check out my list of honorable mentions here.
Selection Criteria For Presales Software
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best presales software for this article:
Core Functionality
There are several different types of presales software that are designed to help streamline your workflow, including CRM, order management, quoting, analytics, and contract management. All of these handle different aspects of your sales process with unique tools and functionalities. However, you can expect some consistency in the performance they offer, including:
- Automation
- Visibility
- Monitoring
- Analytics
- Reporting
Key Features
No matter which presales software you end up choosing, you should consider these key features to ensure they support your presales activities appropriately:
- Opportunity tracking: This presales software feature empowers your sales reps to easily access customer data in one single place and track opportunities throughout their sales cycle. You can use this tool to analyze metrics, like close times and conversion rates, to create a better sales playbook.
- Quoting and pricing: Optimization for quoting, contracts, and pricing reduces manual labor and allows your sales team to generate accurate quotes and contracts for clients much more quickly. These tools often have customizable templates that automatically input essential customer information.
- Lead management: This type of tool is meant to enable your business to capture leads automatically from a variety of sources, including contact forms, websites, social media, and ads. You can also use it to track customer engagement, store contact information, and assign new leads to the right sales reps for follow-ups and sales pitches.
- Document management: Whether it’s document storage or sharing, you need a platform that allows sales reps to safely store sensitive documents from a variety of sources in one location and share those with other stakeholders at will.
- Analytics and reporting: With presales solutions that focus on analytics, you get enhanced insights into sales performance and customer behavior in order to make data-driven decisions. Tracking key metrics and KPIs can surface missed opportunities and suggest next steps in your sales operations.
Usability
When adding new software to your tech stack, you’re always looking for something that’s easy to implement and simple to learn. While some tools offer a user-friendly interface and intuitive navigation, others make onboarding easy with robust customer support and training modules. I prioritized those tools that focused on simplifying the learning process for you.
Software Integrations
Because your operations depend on accurate data, sharing information between your digital platforms is critical. Look at each overview to see which popular integrations are available for these platforms. Some offer native integrations, open API, or connections through Zapier.
Pricing
With such a vast range of tools and capabilities, presales software will also offer a large range of pricing options. You can expect to pay anywhere from $50/month to $350/month for access to essential tools. Some platforms offer customized plans that vary in pricing in order to meet your specific needs.
People Also Ask
Wondering what else you need to know about presales software? Check out this FAQ for answers to the most commonly asked questions.
What are the benefits of presales software?
Presales software is designed to offer a number of benefits for every use case, including:
- Increased efficiency with automation for a number of sales processes that help your team manage their workload by eliminating repetitive tasks, like proposal creation or customer follow-ups.
- Enhanced visibility through an overview of every customer’s journey from beginning to end that helps your sales reps comprehend the needs of each customer. You can also track trends over time for insights into customer responses to different offers.
- Better team collaboration with communication tools that provide avenues to send messages between sales reps, different departments, and different locations within your organization.
- Streamlined performance management with metrics tracking that keeps you up-to-date on the most essential KPIs for your business, including conversion rates, win rates, and close rates. Your sales managers can easily monitor team progress and goals.
Who uses presales software?
Many teams in your organization may find presales software incredibly useful, including:
- Sales representatives who need to create and manage leads, proposals, and sales records
- Financial teams who use this software to run simulations and analyze data for issues and risk
- Marketing teams who need more insights into customer buying habits to optimize campaigns
- Project managers who need presales software to set up project plans, monitor progress, and assign tasks to various team members
- Customer service representatives who can use presales software to respond quickly to customer questions
- Product managers who need to develop PRDs and create product roadmaps to identify areas of improvement for existing products
What steps are included in presales?
The set of presales activities that happen before you actually acquire a customer may include the following steps:
- Doing market research
- Finding and qualifying leads
- Analyzing the data of prospective clients
- Creating proposal requests
- Developing buyer personas
- Conducting discovery calls
- Exploring a competitor analysis
- Building presentations and demos
- Writing scripts and playbooks
- Identifying potential problems and resolving
You determine the order in which these steps must be completed based on your needs, existing tools, and workflow.
Other Sales Software
If my list of presales software wasn’t enough to round out your tech stack, you may want to explore these additional platforms for more advanced sales tools:
- Sales Mapping Software
- Mobile Sales Software
- Sales Database Software
- Sales Coaching Software
- Sales Analytics Software
- Sales Pipeline Management Software
What Now?
I’ve given you a lot to think about with these software overviews, but what should you do now? Consider which of these tools fills a hole in your presales activities, like content management or demo automation, and choose two or three that fit in with your budget and integrations. Reach out to start a trial or get a free demo to see how these tools would function within your workflow.
If you’re looking for even more tool overviews, start with those that I’ve listed above, but don’t forget to check out the rest of the blog for the most up-to-date information. Or, sign up for the RevOps newsletter to get expert insights into current trends right to your inbox!