52 top remote sales tools for your team to absolutely crush it

Looking for the right remote sales tools for your team? Choosing the best tools for your company's needs can be challenging—because there are so many apps out there.

After all, you want tools that make it easier for your reps to make more sales, and enable them to do their best work possible. Some people prefer an all-in-one solution, while others prefer to build a highly customized sales stack by connecting a variety of tools through APIs and integrations. In truth, there's no one definite "right" approach.

So, which remote sales tools will actually enable your team to work smarter and close more deals?

In this chapter, we’re going to dive into 52 apps that empower remote sales teams. From this list, you’ll be able to decide on the right tools that make your team shine.

We’ll be looking at:

• Best remote sales CRMs (5)
• Tools for remote prospecting (7)
• Top sales engagement platforms for remote teams (5)
• Best platforms for remote sales enablement (8)
• Remote sales team building tools (6)
• Best analytics tools for remote teams (5)
• Top collaboration tools for sales reps (4)
• Tools for salespeople to communicate with their team and their prospects (8)
• Best project management services for remote sales managers (5)

Best remote sales CRMs

For a remote team, a CRM is more than just a place to take notes: it’s the hub where conversations happen, deals are closed, activities are tracked, and revenue is reported on. The best remote CRMs give you visibility into the actions your reps are taking, and how those actions translate directly into results.

That said, here are our top five recommendations:

1. Close

Cost: $255 - $1,500 per user annually

Best Feature: Close's built-in communication features, which enable your reps to spend less time on manual data entry and admin work, and more time closing deals.

We're obviously biased, but we truly believe that Close is ideal for agile, performance-focused remote sales teams. With integrated calling, emailing, SMS and video calls, and powerful sales automation features, Close helps reps stay focused on activities that drive revenue.

2. Salesforce

Cost: $3,000 - $8,000 per user annually

Best Feature: The standard for large, enterprise sales teams

Salesforce is a powerhouse CRM that tackles basically everything sales, support, and marketing-related. For remote teams, this monster toolset includes tons of reporting features, meaning sales managers can see exactly what their teams are doing and the results their efforts bring, down to the most minute details.

The only downside: for teams who aren’t already trained to use Salesforce, it will take months to get fully used to running this beast. Also, if your remote sales team works from different countries, Salesforce may not be for you since their calling options are only available in the US and Canada.

3. HubSpot

Cost: $4,000 - $14,000 per user, annually

Best Feature: Marketing and sales conversations in one place

HubSpot is another popular choice for SMBs and startup sales teams looking for a good fit. With live chat features, call and email tracking, and great educational materials, HubSpot can be a good choice for remote sales teams.

Unfortunately, HubSpot does not support inbound sales calls through the CRM, or SMS functions. It also lacks historical email sync, only allowing you to track conversations you’ve had since integrating with them.

4. Pipedrive

Cost: $1,400 - $4,000 per user, annually

Best Feature: Plain and simple CRM that’s easy to start using

This simple CRM does exactly what a CRM should: allow you to manage leads in your pipeline, track communications, automate the busy-work, and give you insights into your sales process. That said, Pipedrive is best for very small teams or solopreneurs, since it lacks the more robust reporting and outreach features of other CRMs. That makes Pipedrive difficult to scale if your remote team is growing in numbers and deals.

5. SalesTable

Cost: Free

Best Feature: Free spreadsheet CRM with a visual dashboard

If you’re just starting out and want a CRM that won’t break the bank, check out SalesTable, the free CRM template for Google Sheets. Here you can log basic lead information and interactions, plus collaborate effectively with other members of the sales team. This template also includes a dashboard that gives you a visual view of the deals in your pipeline.

Tools for remote prospecting

Whether you’re networking with potential customers or trying to engage new leads in conversation, the right tools will allow you to smoothly transition from “Hello” to “Let’s close this deal.”

6. Clearbit

Cost: Only available upon request

Best Feature: Automatically enriched customer data

Learn about your network and your prospects in real-time with Clearbit. This tool keeps you informed about how your leads are interacting with your website, updates about their company or role, and easily accessible and enriched data. This makes it easier for remote sales reps to have a handle on what’s happening in their network without the advantage of rubbing shoulders with these people regularly.

7. LeadFuze

Cost: Starts at $132.30 per month

Best Feature: Starts at $132.30 per month

Looking for leads? Want useful, up-to-date contact info? Then you need a prospecting tool like LeadFuze. It helps remote sales teams stay productive by integrating directly with their CRM and updating information automatically, without duplicating leads.

8. ZoomInfo

Cost: Only available upon request

Best Feature: Real-time sales intelligence

While ZoomInfo can be used to get lead contact information, it’s so much more than a sales prospecting tool. This tool can help your remote team get the latest on what’s happening with the companies and buyers in your network.

9. Profiler

Cost: Free

Best Feature: Industry-specific customer profile tools

To prospect well and sell effectively, you need to know your ideal customer. Profiler is a toolkit that helps you define key profiles inside your existing customer base, including ICP templates based on your specific industry and sales style.

10. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Cost: Starts at $59.99 per month

Best Feature: LinkedIn sales made easy

LinkedIn is the go-to tool for generating leads and searching for information about your prospects. That’s why the LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool: it works alongside you on the platform you’re already using to find new leads. This tool allows you to do a more advanced company search and even suggests leads that fit your criteria.

11. BuiltWith

Cost: Starts at $295 per month

Best Feature: Quickly populate lead lists with companies currently working with your competitors

This prospecting tool allows you to search for specific technologies being used on websites across the globe. That means you can quickly populate lead lists by searching for websites that use your competitor’s technology. You can also filter these lists by technology spend, tech category usage, traffic ranking, usage duration, and more! Another way to search is by keywords, meaning you can search for a specific type of business that is using certain types of tech (or even ones that aren’t using that type of tech).

12. Hunter

Cost: Free for 50 monthly searches or paid plans start at $49 per month

Best Feature: Simple email search

Whether you want to search for all the emails in a company, or for a specific email address of a prospect, Hunter can help you out. It also has an email verifier tool to check whether an email you have is still correct.

Pro tip: Looking for prospecting tools that don’t break the bank? Check out this list of 21 free prospecting tools you can start using today.

Top sales engagement platforms for remote teams

Once you’ve found your prospects, it’s time to talk to them. So, what are the best outreach and sales engagement tools that your remote team can use to build the foundation for solid customer relationships?

13. Outreach

Cost: Only available upon request

Best Feature: Only available upon request

Outreach is a sales engagement platform for remote teams that want to scale their outreach efforts without bogging down their workday. It allows you to maximize your follow-up process, set your own customized sequences, and reach out to prospects on a variety of channels.

14. Reply

Cost: $63 per month, per user

Best Feature: Multi-channel outreach and automation features

The modern sales rep will use many different channels to contact their prospects. And also, depending on where your reps and customers are located, different channels will be more efficient. This is where Reply shines: allowing your team to do outreach and automate sales engagement on the channels where your customers spend their time. Along with email, SMS, and calls, Reply also allows reps to connect with prospects via WhatsApp messages, LinkedIn, and more.

15. Mailshake

Cost: $99 per user, per month

Best Feature: Automated outreach sequences that are customized to your favorite channels

Another outreach tool for remote sales teams, Mailshake works with much more than your email: it allows you to build custom cold outreach sequences through phone, email, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

16. Drift

Cost: Free for Live Chat, advanced pricing only available upon request

Best Feature: Interactive chatbots qualify leads for you

This sales engagement and live chat tool integrates to your website and allows you to interact directly with customers that arrive on important pages. More than that, you can set up Drift with custom chatbots that qualify leads automatically. This saves your sales team the time and effort of manually qualifying all new website visitors and sends your sales team only the leads that are most relevant to your business. In fact, the Drift chatbot can even book meetings with qualified prospects to talk with your sales team!

17. Intercom

Cost: Starting at $39 per month

Best Feature: Live chat with integrated meeting scheduler

Another on-page live chat and chatbot tool, Intercom empowers your team by automatically segmenting and organizing new leads before they even speak directly with your team. For example, set rules within your Intercom chatbot to specify when a new lead should be directed to a free trial signup or should book a meeting directly with a sales rep. Intercom also integrates directly with CRMs like Close.

Best platforms for remote sales enablement

When your team is working from home, keeping them consistently productive is more of a challenge (and infinitely more important). As a sales manager, it’s your responsibility to keep coaching them from a distance, build interactive training, and enable reps by giving them the content and productivity tools they need to close deals faster. Here are eight tools that help you do all of that:

18. Showpad

Cost: Only available upon request

Best Feature: Centralize content and coach at scale

Showpad is a sales enablement platform specially designed to help remote sales managers coach their teams and give them the content and confidence they need to close more deals. You can save content and group it together into customized playbooks, coach at scale with video courses, and use analytics to see how sellers (and buyers) are interacting with your content. Using AI, Showpad will even recommend content to sellers at the right stage of the deal to move things forward.

19. Guru

Cost: Free for up to 10 users, or paid starting at $14 per user, per month

Best Feature: Easy-to-build sales enablement documentation

Keep all of your important documentation and sales enablement content in one place. Guru is the place to build and manage the content that enables your sales team to sell better and gives them the know-how to close deals. It also includes great features such as regular expert verification and a browser extension that brings content to your sales conversations, wherever they’re happening.

20. PandaDoc

Cost: Starts at $19 per user, per month

Best Feature: Document productivity through easy send and sign

Do you know how much time your sales team wastes creating, sending, resending, and getting signatures for documentation with their prospects? PandaDoc is a tool that accelerates deals by giving you customizable workflows for your documentation, including proposals, contracts, and more. Its e-sign features allow your reps to send documents easily, see when prospects have opened them, and get immediate notification when the deal is signed. Plus, it’s easy to create documents that are not only functional but also visually appealing.

21. Confluence

Cost: Free for up to 10 users, or paid starting at $50 per month

Best Feature: A single source of truth for your remote team

This remote collaboration tool combines knowledge management, project collaboration, and social intranet. It offers a connected structure for remote teams, allowing individuals across your remote organization to have one single place to organize their workflows and build a culture of teamwork.

22. Notion

Cost: Starts at $8 per person, per month

Best Feature: A single online workspace for your team

This tool is a team wiki, project management, and documentation tool all rolled into one. Store your sales enablement content (such as sales battle cards, cold call scripts, and email templates), set up projects, assign tasks, and take shared notes from meetings or team syncs.

23. Slab

Cost: Free for up to 10 users, or paid starting at $6.67 per user, per month

Best Feature: Easy topic organization and hierarchy for documents

Your team knowledge can all live comfortably in Slab. The great organization features and search capabilities allow your team to build, analyze, and update their knowledge base easily.

23. TextExpander

Cost: Starts at $3.33 per month

Best Feature: Type your own customized acronyms and automatically populate the text you want

This time-saving productivity tool is great for sales teams who want to avoid typing. All you have to do is create your own snippets, or short acronyms, and TextExpander will automatically fill in your pre-made templates or text. For example, sales teams can use this to take the email templates from their CRM and use them in messages on other platforms, such as LinkedIn.

24. Process Street

Cost: Starts at $12.50 per user, per month

Best Feature: Interactive and multi-media checklists

Your sales team has specific processes that they use throughout the sales process, but how do you keep track of these processes? Process Street is a checklist tool that works as a collaborative workflow for your team. Build your checklist, add media, assign tasks, set up recurring procedures, and integrate with other tools to automate tasks and update other apps when actions are complete inside your checklist.

Pro tip: Many of the tools mentioned above will help you store essential sales enablement content, but how do you get started creating it? Check out The Sales Enablement Toolkit, a free resource with 8 customizable templates that you can use to empower your sales team.

Remote sales team building tools

With a distributed team, how can you make sure your reps are working collaboratively with each other? How can you build camaraderie with people who have never met in person?

Here are six tools to help with your team-building efforts:

25. Ambition

Cost: Only available upon request

Best Feature: Sales coaching, gamification, and performance insights

For sales teams who miss the atmosphere and energy of the sales floor, Ambition is working to get that feeling back for remote teams. Sales managers can set structured coaching timelines and goals, reps can see how they score in various types of contests and leaderboards, and sales execs get team performance metrics at a glance.

26. Howspace

Cost: Starts at $195 per month

Best Feature: AI-assisted peer-to-peer learning and social connectivity

This digital collaboration tool is built to help your remote team learn from each other, even when they’re apart. Rooted in social learning and powered by AI, Howspace helps managers by facilitating workshops and events for their distributed team and helping you work on organizational development and new initiatives collaboratively.

27. Gatheround

Cost: Free for events with up to 10 participants, or paid starting at $5 per month, per participant

Best Feature: Templated online events for remote teams to get to know each other better

Sometimes, generating meaningful conversations with a remote team isn’t easy. Gatheround aims to fix this by helping you add clear structure to your virtual gatherings, whether it’s a one-on-one, virtual mixer, team-building event, and more!

28. Donut

Cost: Free for up to 24 users, or paid starting at $49 per month

Best Feature: Automated conversation starters, team introductions, and more in Slack

Want to get your remote sales reps talking to each other? Donut integrates into Slack and automates conversation builders. You can use it to match remote employees for a coffee chat, add prompts to your virtual water cooler, run a lottery program that matches an employee to the CEO to meet together, and more.

29. Arcade

Cost: Only available upon request

Best Feature: Gamify the sales process to keep remote workers engaged

If you’re looking for new ways to build incentives and create fun rewards for your sales reps, Arcade is setting out to be your new best friend. This tool automates rewards and gives your reps the power to choose their favorite reward out of the list, and can set up fun games for your team so you can focus on getting work done. Best of all, this tool is innovative with its design, moving away from leaderboards to focus on a truly game-like experience in-app.

30. mmhmm

Cost: Free

Best Feature: More interactive Zoom meetings

Feeling like your video meetings could use some pizzazz? Want to dress up your presentations? Mmhmm is a tool that allows you to create immersive slides for your video meetings, meaning you as the presenter are part of your own presentation. There’s also a Copilot mode that allows someone else to run the tech side of the presentation while you focus on what you’re saying. You can even record and share your presentations with others.

This is a fun tool for remote teams to have more interactive, fun meetings. And because of the visual aspect, everyone will walk away with a clearer idea of what was said.

Best analytics tools for remote sales teams

Sales managers need to see what their team is accomplishing in order to set more reasonable goals, forecast more accurately, and coach more effectively.

So, which analytics tools allow you as a sales manager to take a deeper dive into the activities and accomplishments of your team?

31. Gong

Cost: Only available upon request

Best Feature: AI-based sales intelligence to identify key behaviors and top deals

Built especially for remote sales teams, Gong is the modern replacement for walking onto the sales floor and listening to your reps. It captures information about your leads and your sellers from sales conversations recorded into the system, allows you to see what separates top performers from the rest of your team, and gives you real data to back up your decisions and coaching.

32. Chorus

Cost: Only available upon request

Best Feature: Automatically surfaces calls that need attention and opportunities to coach your team

Another call analysis platform, Chorus uses AI to translate call data into actionable advice for you as a manager and for your team. You can track words or phrases in your reps’ sales conversations, and how those affect the outcome of the call. You can also see market insights, such as competitors that commonly come up in sales calls, or pull common phrasing of pain points and problems to add to your sales scripts for future conversations.

33. Geckoboard

Cost: Team prices start at $125 per month

Best Feature: Customizable sales dashboards to track remote sales KPIs

Want to track KPIs and metrics that are gathered in several different apps? Combine your most impactful metrics into one sales dashboard with this customizable sales dashboard tool. You’ll have access to real-time data and can make that visible to your entire team (or company execs).

34. Clari

Cost: Only available upon request

Best Feature: Data collection and AI-powered insights

This revenue operations platform is built to generate clear, visual views of your current sales process and marketing data, and turn that into a more predictable process for generating revenue. Clari also automates forecasting tasks, meaning you can take that real data and turn it into something your reps can act on, rather than spending hours sifting through the raw data yourself.

35. timetoreply

Cost: From $14 per mailbox, per month

Best Feature: Email response time analytics for remote sales teams

This tool allows sales managers to measure email reply times, monitor group mailboxes, and track trends and reply ratios.

Top collaboration tools for sales reps

Collaborating across countries and time zones isn’t easy. You need to implement the right processes and tools to make sure your reps are collaborating with each other effectively. Here are four tools that help you do just that:

36. Google Workspace (Previously G Suite)

Cost: Starts at $6 per month, per user

Best Feature: Synchronous communication and collaboration via email, Calendar, Meet, Docs, Sheets, and more

Sync your remote team with Google suite of work tools, including company email, video meetings, and live working Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and more. Google is the hub where communication and collaboration happen at once, in real-time.

37. Miro

Cost: Free, or paid starting at $8 per month, per user

Best Feature: Real-time collaboration on an infinite whiteboard

Miro is the ultimate tool for creative minds who want to see the big picture or create and organize down to the last detail. It is a fully customizable whiteboard with hundreds of easy-to-use templates, meaning you can do pretty much anything from creating a GTM strategy, mapping a customer journey, building a customer persona, more.

38. Front

Cost: Starts at $19 per user, per month

Best Feature: Easy collaboration for omnichannel communication with prospects

So much of your communication happens in disparate platforms across your toolset. Front works to bring all of those conversations together in one place while allowing your sales team to set and execute workflows based on those communications. Reps can also collaborate on communication in real-time, and instantly create templates from their most effective messages.

39. Podio

Cost: Paid plans start at $9 per user, per month

Best Feature: An online workspace that fosters collaboration and transparency

Podio is a customizable work management tool that allows you to have content, conversations, and processes all together in one place.

Tools for salespeople to communicate with their team and their prospects

Communication is a number-one priority for remote sales teams. As we’ve mentioned before in this guide, remote sales teams and managers must learn how to overcommunicate with each other, as this transparency will help everyone collaborate better and work smarter to get the job done.

So, what are some essential tools for remote sales teams to communicate with each other and with their prospects and customers? Here are eight you should consider:

40. Slack

Cost: Starts at $8 per person, per month

Best Feature: Organized real-time or asynchronous conversations with teammates, wherever they may be located

Slack is the go-to tool for team communication. You can organize teammates into groups, collaborate on projects via specific communication channels, or chat directly with your coworkers. Slack also integrates with other tools to create custom, automated messages. That way, your sales team can stay up to date with new deals in the CRM, receive new lead assignments, or monitor brand mentions on social media for quick follow-up.

41. Zoom

Cost: Starts at $149.90 per year, per license

Best Feature: The standard in video communication

Zoom into your next meeting with the tool that does it all. You can host 100 participants (or more) on a video call, or chat comfortably with your prospects or your teammates.

42. Loom

Cost: Free, or paid starting at $8 per month, per user

Best Feature: Record video messages of yourself while sharing your screen

You know how sometimes you can't explain what you need to, but you can show someone what you mean in an instant? Loom allows you to do that: it's asynchronous video communication through recordings of both your screen and your face, meaning you can explain what you need to while showing what you have to. This is a great tool for reps to explain key product functions to prospects, or for managers to get new hires ramped up on essential sales tech and tactics.

43. Calendly

Cost: $8 per user, per month

Best Feature: Quick, painless scheduling

Calendly is the solution to the countless back-and-forth emails you have when trying to schedule a meeting. Simply set your available times, send someone your Calendly link, and they can book a time that works for both.

Check out more of our favorite scheduling tools for salespeople here.

44. Demodesk

Cost: Starts at $25 per user, per month

Best Feature: Easy-to-run meetings with no download required

This 100% browser-based video meeting tool allows you to quickly chat with prospects, run collaborative browsing and editing, and set up screen sharing in a way that's meant for customer-facing conversations (which is great for product demos). Demodesk also has intuitive schedule features, allowing sales teams to sync their calendars and get round-robin bookings for sales conversations.

45. Dubb

Cost: Free, or paid starting at $40 per month

Best Feature: Create videos and use them for sales communications or for internal communication with your team

Dubb allows you to record videos, build landing pages for those videos, and track views and subsequent actions taken. You can also use your videos with business communication on LinkedIn, or use videos to communicate quickly with your team, even inside Asana or Slack.

46. Twist

Cost: Free, or $5 per month, per user

Best Feature: Keep written communication organized

This Slack alternative is more than just a place to chat with colleagues. If you ever feel like your conversations in a messaging app are getting out of hand, Twist knows how you feel and is attempting to help you keep those conversations organized. Inside specific channels, new conversations are organized into threads, meaning new messages are always the start of a new thread. This makes it easier to go back and reference a previous conversation, and important messages don’t get lost in a never-ending group chat. Twist also lets you send messages to individual team members.

47. Microsoft Teams

Cost: Free (Paid plans of Microsoft 365 start at $5 per user, per month)

Best Feature: More robust instant messaging features

For dispersed teams, Microsoft Teams helps you build conversations and take them anywhere. Like the apps mentioned above, you can organize your conversations to keep everyone focused on the end-goal. Teams also includes interesting chat features such as the ability to send voice messages and inline chat translation.

Best project management services for remote sales managers

While the sales team’s main project (closing deals) is mostly done inside your CRM, there is any number of other projects your remote sales team may need to collaborate on. Here are five tools that help your team build and manage their projects and their time remotely:

48. Trello

Cost: Free, or paid starting at $9.99 per user, per month

Best Feature: Kanban-style boards that you can customize to your workflows

This flexible project management tool allows you to build your own workflows, create your own projects, organize and assign tasks, and keep your plans moving forward.

49. Asana

Cost: Free, or paid starting at $10.99 per user, per month

Best Feature: Flexible project management, built the way you want

A more robust project management tool, Asana allows you to build projects and tasks the way you like. You can see each project as a list, board, timeline, or calendar, and easily switch back and forth between different views. Stay up to date with projects, communicate with your team, assign and complete tasks, and watch your productivity soar.

50. Toggl

Cost: Free for up to 5 users, or paid starting at $9 per user, per month

Best Feature: Time tracking for remote employees

Keep track of your team's work-life balance with Toggl Track, and see how much time they spend doing different tasks. Toggl gives you the ability to monitor the workload of each rep, and helps you see how well they use their time as well as when they may need to take a break.

51. Apploye Time Tracker

Cost: Starting at $2/user/month on yearly plan, $4/user/month on monthly plan

Best Feature: Remote work time tracking and monitoring

Track time with Apploye to know how much time is being spent on each project & task. Apploye allows you to know when your team members are idle. You can also check the usage time of the apps & websites. You can easily know which sales reps were being more productive in their work.

52. Harvest

Cost: Starts at $12 per user, per month

Best Feature: Visual view of your team’s capacity and workload

Harvest is great for team managers who want to beware of burnout on their team. This tool gives you a quick, visual overview of the time your reps have spent working, and who is getting close to their capacity. You can also get a breakdown of the projects your reps were working on while tracking their time.

Build your essential remote sales stack

With over 50 tools in this list, how will you organize your team with the right sales tools to make them more productive?

The goal is to find the tools that best adapt to your sales process and team needs. For example, find the outreach tools that function well with the channels your team sees the most success with. Choose a communication tool that works for your team, whether they prefer synchronous or asynchronous communication. And pick a CRM that is built to empower remote teams, and allows you to call, send emails, SMS, and run video meetings without ever breaking a sweat.

Ready to give Close a spin? Your free 14-day trial is waiting for you: See for yourself why Close is the ultimate CRM for remote, distributed sales teams.

Want to learn more about succeeding at remote sales? Looking for tips and advice to share with your team? Check out our mega list of remote sales tips in the next chapter →