- Sales apps can result in faster sales, stronger tracking and communication practices, happier employees, and increased sales overall.
- The best sales apps can be grouped into several categories, including note-taking, communication and project management.
- The best business sales apps include well-known platforms such as Basecamp and Microsoft Teams, as well as lesser-known names such as WiFi Map and Zoho.
- This article is for business owners looking to purchase sales apps to expedite their sales processes.
There are literally millions of apps that your business can use – over 5.5 million apps, to be more specific. Choosing which apps, though, will improve your operations involves thoroughly researching several competing options and understanding what a good app should offer. Save some time with the sales app recommendations below.
How sales apps help your business
Among the reasons why small businesses should use sales apps include:
- Faster sales. The sales process is time-consuming, but with sales apps, it doesn't have to be. Sales apps can, among other functions, expedite data entry, reduce the time spent between sales cold calls, and provide reports on sales activities. The result is more time you can spend on other business needs – or more time to acquire and retain additional customers.
- Thorough tracking. Sales apps can track your reps' performance, your prospects' interactions with your website and so much more. With this information, analyzing and revising your sales processes becomes far easier.
- Better communication. Completing all of the tasks involved in sales can make your team feel as though it has little time left for communication. Sales apps streamline communication so your team needs far less time and far fewer channels to stay on the same page. With a well-aligned team, more sales can happen.
- Happier employees. Sales apps can make your employees happier, since they allow them to do their jobs more easily. Further, the remote work functions included in many sales apps meet employees' increasing desires for flexible work schedules and locations. With sales apps, your team gets both what they need for work and want for their work-life balance.
- More sales. Even beyond the above reasons, sales apps are particularly deft at helping your team prevent promising leads from slipping through. Every saved lead is another potential sale that could have been missed without sales apps.
Types of sales apps
Among the many types of sales apps you can buy are:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) apps. These apps substantially streamline sales, marketing and customer service work. To learn more about them and find our favorite picks, visit our CRM software reviews page.
- Team communication and collaboration apps. These apps facilitate quicker, more organized communication within and across your teams. To find all of our picks for the best team communication apps, view our list of top small business collaboration apps.
- Task and project management apps. These apps divide your team's tasks into projects, with deadlines and individual team member assignments specified as well. To learn more about these apps and see our favorite picks, visit our project management software reviews page.
- Note-taking apps. Note-taking apps include platforms for creating and organizing traditional text notes. They also include handwriting recognition apps that convert notes taken by hand on mobile devices into legible text. To learn more about handwriting recognition apps, view our list of the top handwriting recognition apps.
- Document management apps. Given the ever-accelerating migration of all work to online spaces, proper digital document management and organization technology becomes increasingly important by the day.
- Travel apps. Our list of the top business travel apps can help you simplify so many aspects of running your business while you're away from the office.
- Presentation apps. PowerPoint is far from the only presentation app that assists businesses in delivering presentations both internally and externally. Our list of the top presentation apps explains why you might want one of these apps in addition to PowerPoint.
Below, we list the best apps in each of the above categories.
Best CRM apps
1. Zoho CRM
Summary: Zoho is a CRM software platform with outstanding features such as artificial intelligence, single-click dialing, customer portals and collaboration tools. We named it the best overall CRM for small businesses.
Pricing: Zoho's prices and subscriptions are as follows, with features increasing by tier:
- Free: $0/month
- Standard: $14/month
- Professional: $23/month
- Enterprise: $40/month
- Ultimate: $52/month
2. HubSpot CRM
Summary: HubSpot is free, if you use it to store fewer than 1 million contacts. Its standout features include quick setup, click-to-call, a user-friendly interface, call recording, and numerous field-leading educational tools and add-on hubs.
Pricing: HubSpot CRM itself is free, but the marketing, CMS, sales and service add-on hubs cost extra. Costs for these add-ons range from $40 to $3,200 per month.
Best team communication and collaboration apps
3. Slack
Summary: Slack is a team instant messaging tool great for one-on-one chats, group chats and whole-team chats consistently devoted to predetermined topics. It also includes file storage and video chat tools.
Pricing: Slack is free for an unlimited number of users, though it does have a paid version. For $8 per month, you get add-ons, including but not limited to an unlimited searchable message history, screen sharing and extensive integrations.
4. Microsoft Teams
Summary: Microsoft Teams is a video conferencing and team messaging app with screen sharing, file sharing, shared workflows and more. It comes with all Microsoft 365 plans.
Pricing: Since Microsoft Teams is part of the Microsoft 365 suite, it's free for Microsoft 365 users.
Best task and project management apps
5. Basecamp
Summary: Basecamp is a project management tool that you can use to send notifications, create message boards, store files and do plenty more. We've outlined Basecamp's extensive features in our Basecamp review.
Pricing: Basecamp has a free and a paid tier:
- Basecamp Personal is free for up to 20 users and 1GB of storage.
- Basecamp Business costs $99 a month. It supports unlimited users and comes with 500GB of storage.
6. Trello
Summary: Trello is a project management app with extensive customization features. Its features include but aren't limited to comments and activity, task and user labels, integrations, and visual tracking.
Pricing: Trello has three pricing tiers:
- Free: With this option, you get 10 boards per team and 10MB of storage
- Business Class: For $9.99 per user per month, you get unlimited boards per team and 250MB of storage
- Enterprise: You'll need to contact Trello for pricing, but the Enterprise plan features include unlimited boards per team, 250 MB of storage, and additional features not available in Business Class
Best note-taking apps
7. Evernote
Summary: Evernote is a note-taking and note-creation app that allows for syncing between devices, annotations, presentation mode, and more. Higher-level Evernote tiers include collaboration features.
Pricing: Evernote has three pricing tiers:
- Basic: $0/month
- Premium: $7.99/month or $69.99/year
- Business: $14.99 per user per month for at least two users
8. Notes Plus
Summary: Notes Plus' handwriting recognition app comes with features such as palm rejection, shape recognition and text exporting. You can also set the color and style of your handwriting, so your text appears more familiar to you.
Pricing: Notes Plus costs $9.99 and is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.
Best document management apps
9. Microsoft SharePoint
Summary: Microsoft SharePoint is a document management app with many included features you won't find in competing apps in this category. Of course, it comes with plenty of meaningful document management features too, including coauthoring, versioning, file sync, team policies and more.
Pricing: Microsoft SharePoint has three pricing plans:
- SharePoint Online Plan 1: $5 per month per user with a one-year term
- SharePoint Online Plan 2: $10 per month per user with a one-year term
- Office 365 E3: $20 per month per user for access to the entire Microsoft Office suite
10. M-Files
Summary: M-Files is a document management app renowned for its ease of use. Its features include version control, workflow automation, optical character recognition and image scanning.
Pricing: All M-Files pricing plans are customized to each customer. For more information, you must contact M-Files for a quote.
Best travel apps
11. Concur Travel
Summary: Concur Travel streamlines expense tracking and invoice generating for traveling salespeople. Through Concur Travel, you and your employees can upload expense receipts for reimbursement approval. You can also plan your travel itinerary within the app and change it as needed.
Pricing: Rather than listing prices on its website, Concur Travel recommends contacting its sales team for a customized quote.
12. WiFi Map
Summary: WiFi Map addresses a frequent travel issue: not having access to either Wi-Fi or mobile data. Its crowdsourced, real-time maps point to tens of thousands of free WiFi spots in major cities, including New York, London and Tokyo.
Pricing: WiFi Map is free.
13. XE Currency
Summary: XE Currency helps you convert currencies in a flash. You can input the amount you're spending in another country's currency to see how much it costs in your currency. You can also use the app to quickly show sales leads at a business conference how much your services will cost them in their currency.
Pricing: XE is free.
Best presentation apps
14. Canva
Summary: Canva has become ubiquitous in the world of Instagram slides, and it's also a powerful presentation tool for small businesses. It includes hundreds of prebuilt presentation templates with modifiable fonts, images, colors and more. It also comes with team collaboration tools and a stock library containing millions of images.
Pricing: Canva has three pricing tiers:
- Free: $0 per month for over 250,000 free templates, hundreds of thousands of free images and 5GB of cloud storage
- Pro: $12.99 a month or $119.99 per year for over 420,000 free templates, 75 million free images and 100GB of cloud storage
- Enterprise: $30 per month per year for everything in Pro, with additional large business features
15. Visme
Summary: Visme is a cloud-based presentation platform with tools for brand consistency, analytics, image storage and more. You can also use Visme to create social media posts, animations and videos.
Pricing: Visme has four pricing tiers:
- Free: The free plan supports five projects and 100MB storage.
- Standard: For $15 per month, you get 15 projects and 250MB storage.
- Business: For $29 per user per month, you get unlimited projects and 10GB storage.
- Enterprise: Pricing is customized for this plan. It supports unlimited users and 25GB storage.