Inside Sales Software Guide Ch. 4: Sales & Marketing Alignment

Read more about sales and marketing alignment in this chapter 4 excerpt from Ambition's eBook, The Inside Sales Software Guide for 2015.

An excerpt from our brand-new eBook: The Inside Sales Software Guide for 2015. We profiled this year's Top 50 Inside Sales tools in order of placement on the Sales Funnel. These were our picks for the best phone-oriented tools to add your Inside Sales arsenal.

Welcome to Chapter IV of the Inside Sales Software Guide. The following 8 products are our picks for the best-in-class sales & marketing alignment tools on the market as of 2015.

Marketing automation is absolutely exploding right now, allowing sales and marketing teams to better coordinate their attack. Prospect intelligence, email and social media automation, and content optimization are pivotal features of the new age products featured here. These are 8 high-quality products, with wildly varying price points, that can help strengthen your inside sales efforts.

CHAPTER IV. Top Inside Sales Tools for Sales & Marketing Alignment

Sales & Marketing alignment is currently in high demand amongst sales organizations. Sales teams needs quality marketing content to capture customers. If your Sales Reps are the soldiers storming your objectives, Marketing is the heavy artillery. These products are dedicated to optimizing and coordinating Marketing strategies around your Sales Process.

1) Hubspot | The SalesForce of Marketing

Hubspot logo

Hubspot’s mercurial growth is a reflection of the product itself -- a perfectly-realized marketing dashboard that includes everything a marketing professional needs to align with sales. As we enter the age of the Inbound Lead, Marketing-Sales Alignment, and Social Selling, Hubspot’s prowess is only going to keep skyrocketing. The price tag is just high enough to require a fair amount of maturity in your Sales and Marketing departments to warrant purchase, but for fast-growing and mid-sized business, this is your product of choice.

Price: Basic: $200. Pro: $800. Enterprise: $2400. Site: https://www.hubspot.com

2) Marketo | Command and Control Center for Professors of Marketing

Marketo Logo

Alright Big Shot, you think you’re ready to enter the world of the Marketing elite? Then saddle up and get with Marketo. A true industry leader, Marketo is for the analytics-savvy, the inbound committed, and the profit wielding. This is going to be an expensive purchase, but it’s also going to provide Apex-level, comprehensive command and control of all the marketing functions needed to create an optimized, more efficient sales process.

Price: Scaled/Bundled Options. Contact for more information. Site: https://www.marketo.com

3) Eloqua | Optimize Marketing Team Coordination

eloqua logo

Does your sales team worship at the altar of inbound leads? Do you see the ideal Marketing Department as a team of analytics-hungry mini-Stephen Hawkings? Do you fall asleep every night dreaming about living in a world where your sales team will never have to do anything again but meet and demo with potential customers? If so, Eloqua is for you, but you better be ready to pay a premium price for having those fantasies come true.

Price: Basic: $2000. Standard: $4000. Enterprise: Varied. Site: https://www.eloqua.com

4) Pardot | Big-Picture Insights on Sales and Marketing Narrative

Pardot lets you track prospect interaction in an incredibly advanced way to monitor warmth or coolness of every one of your prospects. It’s expensive, but man, this is the ideal Sales and Marketing solution for the up-and-coming Sales Team. It’s also the true cutting-edge of Sales and Marketing alignment, so if you’re not an enterprise solution looking to shell out for for Eloqua or Marketo, and you want something that has as much utility to your Sales Team as it does to your Marketing team, Pardot deserves a first-look.

Price: Standard: $1000. Pro: $2000. Ultimate: $3000. Site: https://pardot.com

5) Docurated | For When You Need On-the-Spot Marketing Artillery

Your Sales Team needs quick access to Case Studies, Infographics, and other Marketing materials tailored to their prospects. Docurated transforms hierarchical and disparate content systems into powerful, simple knowledge store, where content can be instantly surfaced by your Marketing and Sales teams at the appropriate time and without having to remember where it lives. We’re in the Golden Age of content marketing, folks, and Docurated is here to make sure you optimize the content you produce.

Price: Contact for Pricing Options. Site: https://www.docurated.com

6) ClearSlide | Follow Trends in Prospect Response to Marketing Efforts

ClearSlide is most definitely part of a new vanguard in enterprise solutions: a business intelligence software focused on prospect/client interaction. Whether it be an email, phone call or meeting, successful sales and marketing is all about effective communication: ClearSlide lets you know when that is occurring. It's not just email tracking. It's not just advanced analytics. ClearSlide is one of the few products out there able to offer sustained, actionable insights into prospect behavior. It's half-spy, half-coach. The benefits that the product offers extend far beyond sales: marketing and IT teams are just as likely to gain valuable insights as sales reps.

Price: Contact for Pricing Options. Site: https://www.clearslide.com

7) Mintigo | For Sales Teams that are Serious about Qualifying Leads

Need an easy way to communicate which leads are best? How about scoring them. Mintigo does that for you, telling which prospects offer your best chances at becoming converted into deals. Definitely a tool better-suited for more mature sales and marketing teams, but a neat addition to any Business Team arsenal nonetheless.

Price: Contact for Pricing Options. Site: https://www.mintigo.com

8) Infer | The Preferred Lead Scoring Solution for SaaS

infer logo

Infer scores prospects and is the preferred solution for the biggest names in SaaS right now, including Box, Zendesk, Tableau, and New Relic. Lead scoring is becoming increasingly en vogue, and Infer is a great way to A) Ensure that your lead generation methods are acquiring the right type of prospects, and B) Bridge the division between your Sales and Marketing teams. A Marketing tool that doubles as a Christmas present for your Account Executives -- who knew?

Price: Based on the number of records processed and connected systems. Site: https://infer.com

The Inside Sales Software Guide: Where To Download

To download our free ebook, go to the Ambition Academy page.

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