Best tools for your business development team

March 9, 2021
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Productivity
Best tools for your business development team

If you’re looking for the best tools for your business development team to take your company to the next level you’re at the right place.

As technology advances, we’re more empowered than ever to build successful businesses. Automation is part of our daily life and business development can definitely take advantage of this. Tools can make our life easier and improve our processes, making us more efficient and successful.

However, before you decide on the best tools for your business development team, make sure you have solid processes in place. Although we love automation, at The BD School we believe that it’s just an instrument to scale our activities, once we know they work. The risk is that you will waste money, and worst, precious time.

For example, if you don’t have a clear ideal customer profile, don’t use an email automation tool. Instead, use your business development team to figure out who’s your perfect customer using a manual approach. This will provide you with extremely good insights, that you can later automate and make your team faster.

Disclaimer aside, these are some of the tools we recommend for your business development team. They cover a wide range of tasks, from market research to lead generation and prospecting. You will find our top pick at the top and these are tools that we used or owned by someone we trust and have met personally. Moreover, we have special deals with many of them, so you can get extra advantage of this list.

So, without further ado, let’s have a look at the best tools for your business development teams to make them more successful!

Best tools for business development: TBDS picks

Expandi

Expandi is the world’s safest software for LinkedIn Automation. This tool will provide you with your own dedicated country-based IP-address. It runs 24/7 in the cloud or at specific times, depending on your settings. It has an auto-warm up feature and smart limits (up to 100 invites and 100 messages in one day).

We are proud to consider the founder, Stefan as a mentor. He’s a very ethical, genuine, and hard-working entrepreneur. Besides, Expandi is the result of his own work in the field, he knows LinkedIn inside out, and just reading his guides will help your team become more consistent and effective.

This is definitely at the top of our best tools for your business development team!

Lemlist

This tool will power your sales teams, agencies, and B2B businesses to personalize and automate cold emails. It supports whatever email provider you use and it only takes seconds to sync. Furthermore, with this tool, you’ll be able to build warmer relationships with prospects and optimize your time as it contains ready-to-use cold email templates.

Besides being a great tool, the founder, Guillaume, is a portrait of likability and a great example of effective communication. Not only will make your team more successful, but they will learn a lot simply by reading their content and being part of their community.

Hunter.io

With Hunter you’ll find email addresses in seconds and connect with the people that matter to your business. The Domain Search lists all the people working in a company with their name and email address found on the web.

With 100+ million email addresses indexed, effective search filters, and scoring, it’s the most powerful email-finding tool. In addition, you can find the email addresses of people you want to contact one by one or in bulk to enrich your database.

We love hunter because it’s not as dodgy as many other email finders. Because, you can only find emails that are publicly available online, which helps your team get the conversation started with their prospects. It definitely deserves a spot in our top picks of best tools for your business development tool!

Trello

Trello is a tool that helps teams work more collaboratively and get more done. Trello’s boards, lists, and cards enable teams to organize and prioritize projects in a fun, flexible, and rewarding way. Whether it’s for work, a side project, or even the next family vacation, Trello helps your team stay organized.

In other words, Trello is one of the best tools for your business development team. At The BD School, we run absolutely everything on Trello. From daily tasks to onboarding programs, passing by mentorship programs, and content creation and we consider it a must in every effective business development team.

Best tools for your business development team: Marketing

SEMRush

SEMRush is the world’s leading marketing toolkit service for all types of digital marketers. This tool contains a complete workflow for any SEO professional and it helps to build an effective social media strategy and create content that drives excellent marketing results.

We think your business development team should know it, to improve the way they communicate with their customers. Because it helps you understand what your customers are looking for, you’ll be better able to create emails and social content that resonated with them.

Instapage

With Instapage you’ll be able to create relevant, on-brand, mobile-responsive post-click landing pages and experiences without a developer. In other words, your business development team can take advantage of more digital channels, without needing expert guidance.

Instapage will increase visitor engagement and conversions with unique landing page experiences for every target audience. As a consequence, your potential customers will love the experience on your website and your business development team will get more qualified leads to work with.

Act-on

This marketing automation solution allows you to optimize your customers’ journeys by building continuous, customized engagement that transforms visitors into prospects. From targeting and acquisition through relationship management and cultivating loyalty, it helps customers discover the products and services that make their lives a lot better. Moreover, your business developers can learn a lot from growth marketers and this is definitely one of the best tools for your business development team.

AWeber

With AWeber, you will have powerful and simple email marketing designed to help your small business grow. Besides, it contains a design assistant that automatically builds amazing-looking branded email templates in seconds.

In addition, your team will be able to create custom emails and landing pages in just minutes without ever writing a line of code. It automates email sending and personalization with built-in campaigns. To sum up, one of the best tools to save your team time and get results.

FunnelCRM

With FunnelCRM you will solve many problems such as losing track of your leads, buried under email, or forgetting to follow up. Firstly, this tool will provide you with a better sales workflow, which will save you time and money. Secondly, you’ll be able to reach your customers with professional, well-formatted proposals. A simple solution to keep track of your entire process in one platform.

Canva

Canva is a tool to create custom templates and designing with a team. You can share designs anywhere and get them professionally printed anytime. Also, it contains 250,000+ free templates, 100+ design types, and hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics.

With Canva you can boost your team’s creativity and supercharge your productivity. Furthermore, it saves time, looks professional, brings your ideas to life, and unlocks endless possibilities.

Zoominfo

This tool will help you find and connect with your ideal customer, it empowers you in each phase of the go-to-market with technology, integrations, and automation. Further, you’ll hit your lead gen, sales, and revenue goals.

Identifying, targeting, and converting your ideal customers will be faster than ever. You will build custom solutions and leverage high-quality data without boundaries.

InsideView

This tool will clean your accounts, contacts, and leads in real-time or on a schedule. That way your sales and marketing teams always have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips. You’ll identify your total addressable market, expand your reach to new look-a-like businesses, and improve sales performance.

Also, you’ll find more prospects that fit your ideal customer profile, and build a high-quality, high-value pipeline. You’ll have access to the most accurate data, insights, and connections needed to identify and engage with buyers at your target accounts.

InsideSales now XANT

This tool accelerates revenue with Real Intelligence in a way CRM and AI alone cannot. Using this tool you can identify people and accounts who will probably convert into closeable pipelines with collective data insights. You’ll be able to connect more often and engage smarter with the right people. And everything in the right ways at the right times. Multichannel workflows are following best practices to convert prospects into pipelines.

SharpSpring

This tool helps you drive more leads, convert them to sales, and optime your marketing efforts. It is the most comprehensive and affordable sales and marketing automation platform on the market. It gives you powerful, easy-to-use tools, so you can concentrate on building the growth of your company.

SharpSpring offers behavior-based email, campaign tracking, dynamic landing pages, chatbots, and Sharp Spring social. Further, it contains CRM and sales AutomationDynamic, form builder, reporting and analytics, and sales dialer. If you want to save some time is one of the best tools for your business development team.

Marketo

Marketo is the world’s leading solution for lead management and account-based marketing. It helps you to build a brand, drive revenue, and prove impact. It’s for lead management and B2B marketers who are looking to transform customer experiences. They’re doing that by engaging across every stage of complex buying journeys.

With this tool you’ll be able to create, automate and measure campaigns across channels. You will identify the right target accounts using data and artificial intelligence. Further, you’ll engage customers with relevant conversations in minutes and target the right customers with personalized display ads.

Sprout Social

This tool helps you build and grow stronger relationships. You’ll be able to understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance. And all that with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.

Sprout Social is a leader in usability, customer support and satisfaction, ROI and user adoption. Also, on this platform you’ll find all points of connection: listening, publishing, engagement and analytics. You’ll be able to understand your audience, reach your audience, engage your community, and measure your performance.

Percolate

This tool is the leading Content Marketing Platform for the Enterprise. It helps you optimize your content operations and unlock the potential of your marketing department. It is purpose-built software designed to solve marketing’s biggest bottleneck, which is content.

With this tool you’ll eliminate administrative work and get your marketers back to marketing. You’ll systemize the marketing supply chain, remove common roadblocks, and frustrating bottlenecks to create more content. You’ll be able to explore new ways to improve how you execute your marketing strategy.

Also, align your marketing strategies with production, execution, and delivery to increase the impact of the content in-market. Further, you’ll connect your marketing teams, coordinate projects, and build complex campaigns and workflows to create cohesive customer experiences.

SocialPilot

This cost-effective marketing tool is great for powerful publishing, insightful analytics, and seamless collaboration. With SocialPilot you’ll have unlimited growth on social media and reduced spendings on tools. You can add all your social media accounts. Post all your updates without ever worrying about running out of limits. Go beyond the popular social networks to increase engagement and leads.

Also, you’ll make data-driven decisions to improve engagement and finetune your social media strategy. Further, you can use workflows to collaborate with teams better. Review and approve all content before it is posted. Invite clients to connect accounts and share reports through white

AngelList

This is the world’s largest startup community. Experience the startup ecosystem, invest in startups, research the fastest-growing companies, and find a job you love. You can apply privately to 130,000+ tech and startup jobs with one application. See salary and equity upfront. This is a friendly community of millions of makers and early adopters awaits. Also, you can speak directly to founders and hiring managers. No third party recruiters allowed.

Best tools for business development: business intelligence

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator you can acquire new business, expand customer relationships and maximise sales productivity. It’s a tool built using LinkedIn’s data to help sales professionals easily harness our data on 660M+ members.

You’ll be able to search and find companies and prospects using multiple features like Advanced Lead & Company Search, Lead Recommendations & Inmails. Real-time sales updates allow you to set up alerts so you receive insights into companies or people as they happen. Further, you can log sales navigator activity directly into your CRM and add notes and tags to your leads.

Owler

Owler is a tool for tracking the companies that matter to you. It contains hard-to-find company data, and strategic news alerts for savvy executives, marketers and sales professionals. With this tool you will be able to access exclusive company data, discover new opportunities, explore the latest news events.

With Owler you can track companies to get smarter news alerts and gain insight into industry shifts and trends. Also, you can keep tabs on your competitors, and monitor what people are saying about your brand. And most importantly stay informed on the industry news that impacts your business.

PitchBook

PitchBook provides comprehensive data on the private and public markets that help global business professionals make more informed decisions. It gives you access to data and the analytical tools you need to get answers fast and discover promising opportunities.

With PitchBook you can research companies, investors, deals, funds, limited partners, advisors, professionals, financials, debt, and lenders. The best tool for your business development team to have all they need in one central platforn!

Datanyze

Datanyze is a tool that applies technographics to everyday sales and marketing processes. You’ll be able to sell and market-based on your prospects’ technology choices, score your existing pipeline, and find net-new accounts.

Further, you will research accounts, search contacts and find email addresses and add technographics to your CRM. It offers predictive analytics to score your existing pipeline and find net-new accounts that match your best customers. Also a simple prospecting workflow, and data enrichment for your CRM. With this tool, both sales and marketing will work together more efficiently to convert qualified leads into deals.

DiscoverOrg

This tool contains deep B2B intelligence and fresh, accurate business contact data. It helps generate the right opportunities, to outpace competitors, and close more deals. You will be able to maximize every stage of your customer lifecycle.

With this tool you will increase leads and pipeline, manage, clean and enrich your data and boost sales team productivity. Further, you’ll capture, connect, convert qualified leads, get a 360 degree view of the market and identify active prospects using buying signals.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you the free tools you need to analyze data for your business in one place. You’ll get a deeper understanding of your customers. Understand your site and app users to better evaluate the performance of your marketing, content, products, and more. Access Google’s unique insights and machine learning capabilities to help get the most out of your data. Analytics is built to work with Google’s advertising and publisher products so you can use your analytics insights to reach the right customers. Process and share your data quickly with an easy-to-use interface and shareable reports.

Google My Business

With a Google My Business account, you get more than one business listing. You can easily connect with customers on Google Search and Maps through your free business profile. You can post photos and offers on your profile to showcase what makes your business unique and keep customers choosing you. Your customers are ready to connect by calling, sending messages or writing reviews. More communication options means more business.

SimilarWeb

This tool provides market intelligence solutions to discover trends as they happen, see your competitors’ traffic, track your market share. Further, to make a right strategic decision, optimize your digital effectiveness and win your market.

With this tool you will be able to reveal best strategies from the market and your competitors. You will understand your market, your competitors and your customers. Finally, you’ll enhance performance throughout your sales funnel and evaluate companies and make better investments decisions.

Industry newsletters

IndustryNewsletters is a leading provider of email marketing tools, delivering proven solutions for professionals. It helps them in building new business and improving client retention.

Further, this is an affordable and effective way for businesses to stay in touch, improve retention and increase sales. It’s a user-friendly email newsletter platform to fuel your marketing, business development, public relations, communication, and client nurturing.

Hoovers

This tool brings sales intelligence to your inbox for free. Increase productivity with access to sales intelligence in your inbox. Hoovers customers are now able to access accounts and contact intelligence right within their MS Outlook inbox with the newly released D&B Email IQ product. Also, upon free install, receive 50 complimentary leads per month.

Albacross

This is the Revenue Acceleration Platform that gives you an unparalleled power to capture companies’ demand and accelerate your revenue. You’ll view and reach out to the companies that show high buying intent, but aren’t converting. Save time and boost efficiency by integrating Albacross into your existing platforms. You’ll be able to identify companies on your website, segment your traffic, and contact key decision makers.

Best tools for business development: lead generation

OptinMonster

This is the most powerful conversion optimization toolkit in the world. You can instantly grow your email list, get more leads and increase sales. OptinMonster generates more subscribers, leads and sales from the traffic you already have. It contains beautiful lead capture forms, multiple form types, Exit Intent® Technology, page level targeting, advanced traffic redirection, and more.

AeroLeads

Aeroleads helps you to search verified business emails of your prospects and leads. You can search with their job title, company, website, location, LinkedIn URL and business phone number. And all this in a real-time makes aeroleads one of the most powerful and genuine email finding tools.

You can find business emails and phone numbers from LinkedIn or find emails by uploading name and company. Find as many as 15 data points like full name, job title, location, generic company emails, business phone numbers etc. Export the data to CSV or transfer data to Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, FreshSales, Zapier etc with 1 click. Rock-solid support via chat, email and phone.

ContactOut

This tool helps you to find anyone’s personal email address or phone number. With this powerful sourcing platform you will be able to hire talents 10 times faster. Their artificial intelligence engine is able to find emails for 75% of the western world. That is two times more than any competitor.

You will easily find emails on Linkedin and Github, save profiles, send email campaigns, and access one billion emails. ContactOut has the highest return rates of accurate emails.

GetEmail

This tool uses big data and machine learning algorithms to find the email address of any professional in any company in one second. It finds the email address of anyone on Earth using the first name, the last name and the domain name of his company.

Manually, it would take you around 5 minutes to find an email when it only takes you a few seconds with GetEmail. If you search 20 email addresses per day, GetEmail saves 2 hours of your precious time.

eMail Prospector

This is a Email Finder Tool built for sales, marketing and lead gen teams. It helps you to find anyone’s business email address and phone number. It does it by using your prospect’s First and Last names and Company (or) Domain name.

You can use this B2B Email Finder to find and verify business email addresses and phone numbers of owners. Also, of top-level executives, decision makers and other employees in the companies worldwide. The email finder tool helps you to find email addresses of people you want to contact. Either one by one or in bulk to enrich your database.

LeadResearcher Pro

This tool is an automated lead researcher software that enables you to find business contact information of sales prospects in seconds. All you need to do is just enter the prospect Name and Company Name. It does advanced Internet searches and helps you to get the business email of the contacts in a few seconds.

LeadResearcher Pro leverages real-time targeted information to instantly find the business contact information. That information any Sales & Marketing professional needs to reach their prospects. LeadResearcher Pro also enables you to quickly find company contact information.

FindThatLead

This took Gets you authentic business emails of new leads at any given company using just their first names, last names and website names. Emails are verified in seconds. It helps you build a targeted campaign and sends it to your leads. And with all the sales funnels and analytics you need to assess performance and grow your business.

With this tool, you can turn profiles on LinkedIn, Instagram, and more into vetted email leads. Further, you can choose from audience segments like location and keywords and reach millions of qualified leads easily.

Lusha

This tool locates accurate B2B contact and company details shortens their sales discovery and closes more deals. You’ll be able to reach top candidates with accurate phone numbers and emails you find on Lusha. It will help you to reach your ideal future customers.

Add Lusha’s extension to your browser, and you’ll be amazed by who you can reach. The accurate contact details make it super easy to get personal with even the most unreachable prospects.

Rocketreach

This tool is the world’s largest and most accurate database of emails and direct dials. You can connect directly with the right decision makers. It contains real-time verified data for 430 million professionals across 20 million companies, worldwide.

With this tool you’ll be able to power up your marketing and get people to pay attention to your business, pursuit, or clients. Further, to find prospects, develop your lists, and track your marketing campaigns.

Dataminer

This AI platform detects signals from public data sets. It’s giving clients an early line of sight into relevant breaking events and emerging risks in real time. Moreover, you can gain the earliest indicators of high-impact events and emerging risks, mobilize and respond with confidence and speed.

Further, you are able to cover the globe or specific locations and stay on top of industry and competitive development.

Vainu business development tool

This tool connects with your sales and marketing platforms to find ideal customers and engage them the right way. You’ll be able to find more revenue with the right company information. It collects raw data from millions of public and private sources and transforms it into detailed company information you can trust.

Also, with the right company information powering the entire business, you’ll increase conversions and close more business. You can build the lists of ideal accounts for any marketing campaign.

Apollo.io

This tool finds your ideal prospects and cracks the code to convert them into customers. You can gather verified email addresses and phone numbers directly from LinkedIn, reach out, and see when they open emails.

Further, you can automate your emails and create a measurable, testable series of touch points. With them you can reliably set up meetings with prospects and customers.

Boomerang

It’s a tool for scheduling an email to be sent later. Works like easy email reminders. You can write an email now and schedule it to be sent automatically at the perfect time. Just write the messages as you normally would, then click the Send Later button. Also, you can take messages out of your inbox until you actually need them. Just click the Boomerang button when you have an email open, and choose when you need it again. Boomerang will archive your message. At the time you choose, we’ll bring it back to your inbox, marked unread, starred or even at the top of your message list.

Further, there are times you need to make sure you follow up within a specific time frame after sending a message. You can select to only be reminded if nobody replies, or regardless. This way you won’t let messages slip through the crack and will never forget to follow up with people.

MailShake

This tool helps you to build sales outreach cadences with email, phone, and social in as little as 5 minutes. You’ll be able to Connect with more prospects, book more meetings, and generate more sales.

Also, you can send personalized cold emails at scale, and engage with prospects via phone and social media. Further, you can do all that in just one sequence, on one dashboard.

Rapportive

This tool is great for Gmail users because it shows you extra information about your contacts if you are using Gmail. When you open up your Gmail account, you can click on a contact and that person’s LinkedIn profile will appear on the right. It is handy if you deal with various businesspersons and freelancers who you do not know very well. It may also show you if they are telling you different things from what they are posting on their LinkedIn profile.

Name2Email

This is a tool for finding an email address by name right from Gmail. Type in the first name, last name, and domain name (starting with @) for the person you’re trying to get in touch with. Name2Email will suggest several possible versions of that person’s email. Just hover over each variation until you see a popup with the person’s name that’s the right address.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are a free notification service provided by Google. It sends emails to subscribers that summarize the search activity around search terms. Recent news articles or other web content containing a search term is included in a Google Alert. Users can set notifications to come daily, weekly, or monthly.

With this tool you’ll know whenever the company’s name is mentioned and by what site. Using alerts to stay on top of developments at a customer helps a business be proactive in supporting the customer and avoiding surprises.

Streak business development tool

This is a tool for managing partners, investors, leads, projects, buyers, and sellers from Gmail. It allows you to set up and customize a perfect process for your team no matter the use case or how you work. As simple as a spreadsheet, adding, editing, and collaborating is a piece of cake. Furthermore, you can easily filter, sort, and group your data in any configuration to quickly identify bottlenecks. See upcoming tasks across all your pipelines.

Best tools for your business development team: prospecting

Hubspot

This tool will help you to increase leads, accelerate sales, simplify your processes, or build a powerful website. It will help you to grow your business better and faster.

You’ll be able to grow your traffic, convert leads, and prove ROI with all-in-one marketing software. Also, you’ll close more deals faster with a suite of productivity-boosting tools for every part of your process. Further, you’ll connect with customers and exceed their expectations and create, edit, and maintain a more secure and optimized website.

Pipedrive

This tool is full of features that help you prioritize deals, track performance, and predict revenue. You’ll get more leads fed straight into your sales pipelines around the clock from your custom chatbot and web forms.

With this tool, you can track calls, emails, and contact history exactly where you need to. You can have full visibility and control of your schedule. Further, you can eliminate busywork by automating repetitive administrative tasks and learn from artificial intelligence.

Outreach.io

This is a platform to drive efficiency and effectiveness for Marketing, Sales Development, Closing and Success teams. You can optimize the customer lifecycle for revenue lift. There is intelligence and insights to optimize customer engagement throughout the customer lifecycle. Outreach is more than just software, with Sales Engagement Platform, you get a playbook for team success.

SalesLoft

SalesLoft helps B2B sales teams close more deals. It integrates with today’s top CRMs, turning your data into easy, actionable, multi-channel steps that help sellers get to “yes” quicker.

This tool automates human interactions between buyers and sellers. You still get the flexibility to personalize those interactions across email, phone, social, direct mail, and video. And all your activities are automatically synced back to the CRM.

Pardot business development tool

Pardot is a marketing automation solution. It helps companies create meaningful connections, generate more pipelines, and empower sales to close more deals. With this tool you will get more leads, understand your customers, and deliver personalized content.

Reply.io

This is a sales engagement platform that automates email search, LinkedIn outreach, personal emails, and calls. It eliminates routine work and lets your sales team focus on what really matters, for instance, closing deals. You’ll be able to discover prospects with unlimited email searches. Furthermore, you can also combine personal emails, follow-ups, calls, social touches, and tasks into a multichannel sequence. That way you can reach your prospects wherever they are.

Crystal

This tool gives you personality insights for your coworkers, candidates, and customers, and helps your entire team to communicate better. Personality insights drive better decisions, stronger teams, and more effective conversations.

With this tool, you will adapt your emails, phone calls, and meetings for every customer’s unique personality. You will identify key personality traits for any job and predict candidate success. Moreover, you’ll create Playbooks to help your team communicate and collaborate effectively.

Winmo…with this business development tool

Winmo is a sales prospecting tool that delivers the information you need to identify opportunities and close more deals with advertisers and agencies. With this tool, you will easily find your next client today. You will Get to budget owners faster and break into new territory.

Further, you’ll learn about prospects’ strategies, struggles and spending behaviors so you sound like the expert they’ve been waiting for. It will help you close deals faster by alerting you of campaigns, spending shifts and potential partnerships on the horizon. It will allow you to begin outreach months in advance.

Best tools for your business development team: calling

Skype

Skype is a great communication tool for free calls and chat. It provides audio and video calling, smart messaging, screen sharing, call recording and live subtitles and private conversations. You can easily create and join any meeting with Skype. Also, just one click creation without the need to sign in or download Skype app.

With Skype’s features you can ace your interview from anywhere and anytime. No matter where you are, stay connected with your friends, family and colleagues with Skype Web.

Toky

This communication tool integrates with existing business tools and offers a turn-key communication solution for all of your teams. You can instantly log calling and messaging activities across all devices to your CRM.

Toky automatically syncs interactions to the right customer records. It unifies data across business systems, enables your support team to offer highly personalized customer experiences and resolve issues faster. Further, it makes your business easily reachable via virtual mobile and local numbers and a click-to-call button on your website.

Aircall

Aircall is The phone system for modern business. It is simple to set up and easy to use. It is cloud-based call center software connected to your tools. You can monitor individual and team metrics in real-time to start making measurable improvements.

You can create new numbers, teams, and workflows on the fly whenever new business requirements arise. Also you’re able to book more meetings and close deals quicker with PowerDialer, click-to-dial, real-time coaching, and more cloud capabilities.

Join.me

This is a tool for hosting a meeting or joining one. All you need to do is create your own personal code. You can customize your meeting link to whatever you want. Brand it to your company, to the meeting subject, or even to match your personality. Setting up your personal link means that folks joining your meeting get familiar with you and your brand before they have even entered the meeting.

Further, you can customize your meeting background. Give your meeting attendees a fun picture to look at, or brand the background with a company logo. It’s simple to change so you can even switch it up for the holidays. Also, you can share a screen in just one click.

Best tools for your business development team: Social media

Twitter

This is a microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Registered users can post, like and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. With this tool you can follow your interests, hear what people are talking about and join the conversations. With Twitter you will always know what’s happening in the world.

LinkedIn

This is a business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. It is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs.

LinkedIn allows members (both workers and employers) to create profiles and “connections” to each other in an online social network. That network may represent real-world professional relationships. Members can invite anyone (whether an existing member or not) to become a “connection”. You can easily reach and connect with professionals all around the world. This is one of the best tools for your business development team to build their credibility and establish relationships.

LinkedIn Helper

With this tool you can automate your work with LinkedIn. Grow your network by automatically inviting targeted 2nd & 3rd level contacts with a personal note. Build smart message chains with auto-responder to newly added connections and drip campaigns for chain messaging with reply detection. It also contains dozens of features and tools for Linkedin, Sales Navigator and Recruiter automation. You’ll be able to save contacts to built-in CRM or export into a CSV file.

The feature we love the most is the advanced filters that can really help you keep track and spot the opportunities at the right time. Definitely, one of the best tools for your business development team.

Hootsuite

This tool offers the best way to manage social media. You can manage multiple social networks, connect with customers, and grow your brand on social media. With this tool you’ll put all your profiles in one place, schedule posts across multiple networks, and easily measure results.

Further, you’ll be able to monitor up to 10 social profiles, have auto content scheduling, real-time analytics, and bulk scheduling. It’s ideal for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and independent consultants.

Buffer

Buffer is a simpler social media tool for authentic engagement. You can tell your brand’s story and grow your audience with a publishing, analytics, and engagement platform you can trust. Also you can publish your content and analyze your campaigns. You’ll be able to measure your performance, create reports, and get insights to grow reach, engagement, and sales.

With this tool you will visually plan and schedule your social media campaigns. You’ll coordinate creative campaigns to drive engagement on social networks. Further, you’ll build your community on Instagram and engage with the most important comments to faster and gain customer trust.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a consumer intelligence platform. With it you will be able to react to every consumer trend. Every day, thousands across the globe talk about your products, your brand, and your competitors. Discover every new trend before anyone else and make smarter decisions.

Further, you’ll find more new market opportunities. The next big opportunity for your brand is already being talked about by your customers. With our industry-leading artificial intelligence, you can follow every conversation to discover insights that grow your business.

Buzzsumo

This tool allows you to use content insights to generate ideas, create high-performing content, monitor your performance, and identify influencers. Millions of marketers rely on BuzzSumo to reveal the truth about what content works and what sinks without a trace. Further, the platform has four key components: discovery, research, influencers, and monitoring. With this tool, you will know how to increase productivity and content success. Buzzsumo is one of the best tools for your business development team, so they will write content that gets your prospects interested

Crowdfire

This tool helps you discover and schedule content, and manage all your social accounts from one place. You can discover relevant content based on your topics of interest. It automatically discovers articles and images your audience will love. Then you can share them to all your social profiles and keep your timelines buzzing. Furthermore, you’ll be able to schedule all your posts in advance and publish them automatically. You can choose the best times and save tons of time and effort.

Coschedule

This tool will organize all of your marketing in one place from anywhere. You will get more done in less time with this work management software for marketers. It contains a blog calendar, marketing calendar and marketing suite.

You’ll be able to manage marketing requests and automate team workflows. Also, sort your calendar by team, store assets and files, and track team progress.

Best tools for your business development team: planning

Calendly

Calendly is a tool that helps you schedule meetings without back-and-forth emails. Setup is easy. Let Calendly know your availability preferences and it’ll do the work for you. Also, share your Calendly links via email or embed it on your website. They pick a time and the event is added to your calendar.

It works with your Google, Outlook, Office 365 or iCloud calendar so you’re never double booked. You can set buffer times between meetings, prevent last minute meetings, create secret event types, and more. It works great for individuals, teams and departments.

Asana business development tool

This tool will help you to go beyond to-do lists and get the features you need to plan and manage projects from start to finish. Also, you’ll plan better projects, track what’s important to your team, and get everyone on the same page. That way you will produce better work faster.

This tool will give your team increased clarity, it will increase accountability on your team, and help hit your deadlines. You can also connect with the tools you rely on every day such as Slack, Outlook, or another tool. Connect them with Asana to add important information to relevant projects and keep your work in one place. All considered one of the best tools for your business development team.

Monday

This is a platform for managing your team and your work. You’ll be able to manage everything in one workspace. Planning, tracking and delivering your team’s best work will be very easy with this tool. You can get started with hundreds of visual and customizable templates or create your own. Also, you’ll easily integrate with your existing tools in a few clicks.

Further, you can automate the repetitive work in seconds so you can avoid human error and focus on what matters. You’ll be able to view data as a map, calendar, timeline, kanban, and more.

Kissflow

This is a platform to optimize, manage, and track all of your work. It contains process management, case management, project management and collaboration. It’s possible to make rich and automated workflows which can be built by anyone. Moreover, flexible workflows will put users in control. This tool is an intuitive approach to managing projects.

Forecast

Forecast is a tool that connects your existing tools to unite your projects, resources, and financials in one AI-native platform. Its AI cuts down on non-billable work like project planning, resource allocation, and filling out timesheets. That way you can focus on the most important things. You’ll be able to supervise projects and teams with a visual all-in-one platform, so everyone gets a fair share of work. Also, you’ll optimize your day to day work and see months ahead of the project schedule.

Further, you can get complete operational and financial visibility across your portfolio, so you can make strategic decisions and plan for company growth. Analyze the performance of everything from portfolio to individual contributors in real time. Instantly create realistic project plans to set the right expectations from the start. Keep stakeholders in the loop with real-time updates containing any level of detail you choose.

Slack business development tool

Slack is a place where people get work done, together. Unlike email, conversations in Slack are easy to follow. And they’re more than conversations, you can make calls, share files, and even connect with other apps.

There’s a history you can see and search. Projects end, teams change and Slack saves everything. Rather than trying to remember, easily find what you’re looking for. You’ll be able to work closer with other companies. Keep clients, vendors or partners in the loop by sharing a channel in Slack.

Slack is in the list of best for tools for your business development team, because we think it really helps build an amazing culture where everybody is motivated and energized.

Best tools for your business development team: miscellaneous

Prezi

It’s a tool for creating inspiring, engaging visuals in minutes, then appearing alongside them as you present. You can record to share later or go live with your favorite video conferencing tools. Create moving, zooming presentations that grab attention and keep it. Appear right alongside your content while presenting to your audience. Make stunning interactive charts, reports, maps, infographics, and more.

Unbounce

This is a great tool for growing your business. You can create and measure your landing pages quickly with templates that are stunning and easy to work with. Create gorgeous, high-converting landing pages with Unbounce’s drag-and-drop builder. Whip up an on-brand showstopper in a matter of hours. You can also get fancy by adding custom scripts and integrations.

Make any template 100% your own. Every element can be completely customized, helping you stay on-brand while still designing for conversion. Immediately capture your visitors’ attention with stunning full-background video clips that autoplay in page sections. Declutter your pages and display extra text and images using visitor-triggered lightboxes. This helps you avoid linking off your page, and keeps visitors focused on your call to action.

MixBloom

In a few clicks, MixBloom matches you with a Social Media Manager, helping you create high quality social media content at scale. Now you can deliver social media campaigns with the confidence you can deliver quality content on time, at scale.

This tool prepares quality social media posts, images, videos and more, while you focus on growing your business. A team of expert copywriters will craft original content designed to engage and convert. Your clients approve, feedback, and edit content directly on your white label dashboard, running on your own site.

Verblio

This tool Co-create deeply personal content to power content marketing and SEO. It’s about the writing. Verblio does it better with expert blog and content writing services. Verblio writers have diverse professional backgrounds to serve a variety of industries. The tool helps agencies, publishers and enterprise customers scale content to new heights.

It’s a platform that creates quality content for your clients or business. Further, drive traffic to your site with cost-effective blog and website content from savvy writers. Scale quickly with a simple solution.

Curata business development tool

Curata is a Content Curation Software (CCS). You’ll be able to fuel your content marketing engine and discover the best content with this self-learning engine. Further, you’ll easily organize and contextualize with just a few clicks and Publish and promote your content anytime and anywhere.

Better Proposals

With Better Proposals, you can create beautiful, high-converting, easy-to-sign proposals in minutes instead of hours. You’ll be able to create fantastic proposals with different types of media in half the time. It will also shorten your approval process. The Automatic Designer makes it easy to create great-looking proposals in minutes. It contains over 160 beautiful templates that look perfect on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

Further, your clients can immediately sign your proposal and pay your fee, all from the secure and encrypted web link you send them. Also, reporting and tracking features let you see where each proposal is in the sales process. That way you can track who’s ready to sign, who’s ready for follow-up, and who needs a little more nurturing.

Grammarly

This is a tool for up-level your workplace communication. It checks grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It is built for individuals to improve their writing through our advanced writing feedback. And also for teams to ensure their communication and writing are professional and clear. Grammarly protects your data using a combination of technical, physical, and logical security safeguards.

This is one of the best tools for your business development teams…so you can forget those basic mistakes that make you cringe.

Enloop business development tool

This is an easy business plan template software. You can invite your team, your accountant and your business partners to view and edit your plan. Choose from 100+ currency symbols and number formatting for your country. This tool creates customized text you can edit. And automatically sync your financial data into your text for painless updates whenever you change your financials. Also, it generates bank-ready financial forecast reports in your business plan. And then explains everything to you.

SheetShare

SheetShare is a community-curated library of spreadsheet templates, how-to guides, and videos created by users like you. You can share your spreadsheets with the community. Explore and discover How-to-guides and Spreadsheet models. Further, join groups to share and discuss your favorite topics. Create personal pinboards of relevant spreadsheets found on SheetShare. Find and share spreadsheet innovation via your favorite spreadsheet program. Choose from Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers & iOS Numbers, Spreadsheet.com, and more.

Spreadsheets can be a great help, but too many of us don’t really know how to use them at their full potential. That’s why, SheetShare is one of the best tools for your business development team. So they can save time by becoming spreadsheet wizards.

Pablo business development tool

With this tool you can create beautiful images easily to make your posts pop and increase your social media engagement. You can make every post beautiful. Search over 50,000+ images and shuffle for added fun. Say your message with style. Choose over 25+ stylish fonts and have control over formatting. Every size will fit. Be creative once and then resize easily for popular social networks. Also, share to popular social networks directly from Pablo or download to use anywhere.

To sum up…

Automation is great on so many levels. It helps us become more efficient, waste less time and eventually, get more results. However, it’s important that you choose the right tools that will make your life easier and it’s not always easy to prioritize. Often, we end up with so many tools that we can’t even remember why we signed up on the first place.

We hope this list of the best tools for your business development team, will make your decision-making process a bit easier. If you’d like a second opinion on your business development process, get in touch with our team. We are happy to help!

Join our personalized training platform and become a business development pro!

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