We have further shortlisted the Top 3 out of Top10 Marketing and Sales tools for Small and Medium Businesses.

Business growth is driven by the marketing and sales activities of an organization. With the digital marketing and sales landscape exploring the market, a massive amount of content passes through a marketing and sales representative’s desk on a daily basis and it becomes challenging to align online and offline marketing activities. Sales enablement resolves this issue as it aims to de-silo sales and marketing aligning business goals and empowering sales and marketing representatives with the right messaging, right asset, at the right place and at the right time for the right customer.

Here is are the top three tools to help business owners if their marketing and sales functions are facing struggles, these tools may help you centralize campaign management, make sense of all the data and start closing more deals.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a tool that enables you to make revolutionary business applications designed to generate leads and get new customers enabling firms to sell, service and market the products and services in a smarter way. This tool helps users to access the company’s social network to fetch more resources, find competitive information and find experts.

Pros

• It promotes a vibrant user community. The company uses its own ideas and solutions to solicit community input, actively monitor social channels and provide online communication for customers to make themselves heard.
• The user-friendly interface maximizes consumer technologies delivers a simple and rewarding user experience.
• The tool’s combination of Force.com, PaaS tools, and AppExchange, leads the CRM industry in terms of cloud integration and software customization

Cons

• As Salesforce continues its transition from a CRM to a platform company, several CRM competitors have exceeded salesforce’s CRM features, capabilities, and functions.
• Unlike primary competitors such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP who offer a choice in deployment and a choice in the cloud platform, Salesforce does not support any public cloud which limits hosting options.
• Salesforce is competitively weak in the SaaS CRM industry to achieve lead marketing automation capabilities such as digital prospect tracking, progressive profiling, etc.

Timetrade

Timetrade is easy to use appointment booking program allowing users to schedule meetings integrating conveniently with Office Outlook. It is a highly specialized tool with capabilities to schedule, confirm, cancel and reschedule appointments keeping track of their availability.

Pros

• Uses an online scheduling portal which can be accessed through any mobile device to quickly see availability time slots of the people and quickly book appointments.
• Send reminders and confirm meetings by sending notification emails to make sure people reach on time.
• The calendar that the users use to book appointments is simple to use with pull-down menus and also showing availability time slots.

Cons

• The only way for the clients to know about the online scheduler is to send an email invitation with a link urging them to use the feature.
• The clients aren’t able to cancel or reschedule appointments on their own once they have been made. Clients don’t have details regarding the cost for the particular appointment, have no access to the waitlist and can’t see available appointments in their own time zones.
• Timetrade lacks features such as client histories, scheduling, and tracking payments or allowing multiple users.

Okta

Okta is an efficient tool to combine all the office tools in powerful ways to offer stronger security and better user experience. Okta provides a central entry point into all the applications used in an office using a single set of credentials providing users their own personalized dashboards enabling quick access to apps.

Pros

• Easy to navigate platform provides fast-paced workflow. Convenient to use across OS platforms and low budget makes it more preferable compared to the competitors.
• Simple to configure and user-friendly platform with the high quality of customer support.
• Rich features such as Active Directory Integration, Remote password Resets, Password Management for all apps, Reporting, and Auditing have maximized the number of Okta users.

Cons

• Okta faces occasional syncing issues as all apps are not Okta verified.
• Sometimes the unusual location of settings causes inconvenience.
• Connection to apps sometimes takes longer if the vendor makes some changes

Conclusion

On comparing the overall capabilities of all these tools, they all are unique and serve different purposes. Salesforce offers overall CRM features enabling you to navigate through important people and information fetching information through social hub while Timetrade is a very convenient way to organize appointments across platforms and devices. Okta, on the other hand, will make your workflow more convenient and less time consuming providing you access to all the office applications using a single set of credentials.

You can find the detailed Marketing and Sales tools product reviews for Salesforce, Okta, and Timetrade.