Choisir le meilleur outil SDR : les 5 meilleures solutions pour améliorer la productivité

Ulysse Wolff

Remote Works

What is an SDR Tool ?

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SDR Tool: definition

An SDR tool is a software solution used by Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and other salespeople to facilitate and automate the daily tasks of a sales job. SDR tools generally include features such as lead management, contact automation and analytics.

Why use an SDR tool ?

An SDR tool is precious for any sales team as it allows to significantly improve the efficiency of the sales process through several main capabilities:

Job automation: An SDR tool is generally used to automate traditional sales tasks such as follow-up emails, appointment scheduling, and data entry.
Improved prospecting: An SDR tool helps in the prospecting process with features helping identify and research potential leads.
Lead management: SDR tools usually perform lead scoring and are able to prioritize high-potential leads to help sales reps organize their work.
Analytics and reporting: SDR tools are usually equipped with analytics capabilities to provide insights into sales performance, pipeline status, and forecasting.
Collaboration features: An excellent SDR tool includes collaboration features designed to boost your sales team's efficiency, such as the ability to promptly respond to teammates' actions and tag them as needed.

Now that you know why an SDR tool is vital for your sales team, let’s get to the heart of the matter: the top 5 SDR tools.

The TOP 5 SDR tools to improve your sales team’s efficiency

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Claap: the best option overall

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What is Claap?

Claap is originally a meeting assistant. It helps you manage your meetings more effectively as it transcribes the audio and video of your meetings and also has a recording feature. Using it as a salesperson is a gamechanger: no more note taking, and no need to summarize your notes as Claap is equipped with AI features and does it for you.

Claap increases your conversion rate

Claap isn’t only a meeting assistant. It’s also an asynchronous meeting tool that introduces a new way of communicating using claaps: 2 to 5-minute videos you can record easily using Claap’s interface. It’s very simple: you just click on a button and you can record your screen while having your camera on. This way, it’s very easy to show anything you’d want to show during a synchronous meeting, and the experience is very similar. Once your claap is recorded, you can send it to your prospects/clients for any step of the sales process. For instance you could send a claap instead of a prospecting email. Guillaume De Nacquard, from Surfe, does so and he has great results:

“Every time I was doing that I had like 40% conversion rates compared to like 3, 4, or 5% with normal approaches.”

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Claap re-defines your sales process

With Claap, you don’t have to proceed with traditional synchronous meetings. It helps reducing the length of your sales cycle: instead of trying to find a slot that fits your agenda and your prospect’s and then taking 30 mn in a synchronous meeting, you just record your claap, send it and your prospect can watch it whenever they want.

And Claap works well because we thought about everything you might need:

Countless ways to share your claaps : Your prospects/clients will always be able to see your claaps. You can attach them to an e-mail, embed them to a website or just share them on your Claap’s workspace, there are tons of sharing options available !
Top collaboration features : Even when you interact with your prospect/client (or teammate) using claaps, the experience is very close to the traditional approach with synchronous meetings. Your prospects/clients can leave comments or feedback on a specific part of the video (even a specific part of the screen) so they can have clear requests. They can also send video replies to your claaps to replicate the traditional communication way. You have all the pros with zero cons !

Alejandro Salinas, from Surfe, reduced significantly the length of his sales cycle using Claap:

"I've managed to shorten my sales cycle because I replace 30-minute meetings with prospects with three five-minute videos. I've literally seen ten days just fall off of that process and allow me to go quicker. "

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Claap’s limitations

I might be biased, but I can still admit that Claap has some limitations:

Compatibility: Claap’s desktop app is currently only available on Mac. Windows is on the way.
Limits of the Free Plan: Claap only allows 10 video uploads with the free plan.

Claap’s pricing

Basic: Free with an upload limit of 10 videos.
Starter: $10/month per user with unlimited videos upload/storage.
Pro: $30/month per user with access to AI features.
Enterprise: Custom

Salesforce: the most comprehensive option

Salesforce is a CRM. It contains a large panel of features that make it a very comprehensive option.

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Salesforce’s main advantages

Comprehensive tool: Salesforce offers an all-encompassing platform to manage every aspect of customer interactions, from initial contact to closing the sale. It provides a complete view of all interactions and allows you to leverage advanced features to personalize your approach.
Marketing automation: With Salesforce's marketing automation tools, you can create targeted campaigns and monitor their performance. This includes automating emails and workflows, enhancing your productivity and efficiency.
Automation capabilities: Salesforce Flow tools enable you to easily standardize and automate CRM operations. You can create workflows to guide your sales team through each step of the sales process, ensuring consistency and efficiency.
Beyond a Simple CRM: Salesforce offers a vast array of native applications and integrates with thousands of third-party apps. Its extensive range of products, including net-zero sustainability management, custom analytics solutions, and connected experience integration, ensures you can achieve virtually any business objective.

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Salesforce’s limitations

Initial learning curve: Too many features is not always the best solution. Due to its heavy interface, Salesforce might require a longer learning curve for new users.
Quite expensive: Salesforce is an amazing SDR tool. But it comes with a hefty price that might not be adapted to your budget. For more information, have a look at the next section on pricing.

Salesforce’s pricing

Starter : $25/month/user with limited features (mainly custom reports)
Professional : $80/month/user with more features (lead scoring notably) and a larger storage capacity
Enterprise : $165/month/user with larger customization capabilities
Unlimited: $330/month/user with Generative AI capabilities
Einstein 1 Sales: $500/month/user with all the features, and third party integrations facilitated

Salesloft: the best tool for effective sales cadence management

Salesloft is a sales engagement platform. Like Salesforce, it’s a comprehensive tool that assists you throughout the sales process.

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Salesloft’s main advantages

All the main features for managing customer relationship: Salesloft is a comprehensive tool equipped with all the main features you’d expect from such a tool: email automation, engagement tracking, analytics, reporting, etc…
Pipeline visualization: Salesloft offers a detailed view of every sales pipeline opportunity and each stage of the sales cycle, giving your team a very clear picture of the situation at any time.
Post-sales data: Salesloft includes post-sales data, allowing customer success teams to transition from the sales process to ongoing customer engagement and support.
Multi-step sales cadence: Salesloft allows you to create detailed multi-step sales cadences, define each step (email, phone call, LinkedIn message, etc.), and schedule them in advance.
Effortless mastery: One of Salesloft’s main advantages is that its interface is very user-friendly. Its fluid UX presents all crucial information on a comprehensive dashboard. Also, onboarding and training events are highly effective, enabling you to master the tool quickly.

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Salesloft’s limitations

Issues with specific functions: Some users have reported having bugs when using some functions, especially the Gmail extension and the Dialer.
Spam calls: Salesloft doesn’t help with spam calls as it’s unable to block or silence them.

Salesloft’s price

Salesloft doesn’t give pricing information.

You can expect to pay between $125 to $165 per user per month to use Salesloft. You’ll also certainly have to pay an onboarding fee between $500 and $1000. There is no minimum seat requirement which makes it adapted to any business size.

Sales Navigator, the best tool to use with LinkedIn

If you’re a salesperson, you should know that a lot of prospecting is done via LinkedIn. That’s why LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be a good option if you’re looking for an SDR tool.

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Sales Navigator’s main advantages

Tailored lead recommendations: LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to create a customized list of lead recommendations based on your precise criteria, including industry, job title, location, and more. This helps you target only the most relevant prospects for your business.
Advanced search features: Sales Navigator is equipped with advanced search features so you can look for prospects searching for a specific company, job title, but also keywords to find your prospects based on their interests (it also gives you a nice icebreaker).
Lead insights: Sales Navigator informs you in case a change occurs to a prospect's job title, company... This allows you to make more informed and timely outreach.
InMail messaging: LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to send direct messages to potential leads even if you are not connected with them on LinkedIn. It increases your chances of making valuable connections.

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Sales Navigator’s limitations

Search function is not always functional: The search feature sometimes gives inappropriate results so you need to be careful and not fully rely on the results.
Limited in terms of features: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an amazing tool to use with LinkedIn for lead generation. However, it doesn’t have other use cases and isn’t as comprehensive as the other options mentioned.

Sales Navigator’s price

Sales Navigator doesn’t give public pricing information. But according to my research, here are the different plans offered:

Sales Navigator Core: $99/month/user with the features mentioned above
Sales Navigator Advanced: $149/month/user with the possibility to share content with your prospects.
Sales Navigator Advanced Plus: $1600/month/user with CRM integrations and other enterprise integrations.

Calendly: the best free option

Calendly is a meeting scheduling software. It can even be considered as the leader of the meeting scheduling software market. Let’s see why it’s so appreciated by customers.

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Calendly’s main advantages

One-click meeting booking: Calendly simplifies the meeting scheduling process with its one-click booking option, which can be used across various communication channels such as your website, email, and LinkedIn DMs. This feature simplifies appointment setting for both you and your clients.
Team scheduling: Beyond individual user pages for booking meetings, Calendly enables the creation of team pages, allowing customers to schedule appointments with any member of your team. You can also implement round-robin scheduling rules to automatically assign meetings to team members based on their availability, ensuring an even distribution of appointments.
Lead routing: Calendly offers the capability to create routing forms that automatically direct leads to the appropriate salesperson. This ensures that each lead is handled by the most suitable team member.
Simplified User Interface: Calendly is known for its very clean user interface. The tool is easy to master, and pleasant to use.
External tools integrations : Calendly integrates with more than 70 tools for a complete experience. It includes personal calendar tools (Google Calendar, Exchange Calendar, iCloud Calendar, Office 365, and Outlook Desktop) and video conferencing platforms, ensuring that conference details are automatically included in your meeting invite without any extra steps.

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Calendly’s limitations

Limited lead routing capabilities: Calendly can only route leads based on ownership or by requiring additional fields in your form, which makes the process more complicated for users.
Manual adjustment of round robin assignments: Calendly can’t automatically handle no-shows and cancellations and requires manual intervention to adjust round robin assignments.

Calendly’s pricing

I said that Calendly is the best free option because its free forever plan is completely viable and used by millions of people worldwide. But Calendly also offers other plans worth mentioning:

Free: With unlimited 1:1 meetings and one event type (for instance a 30-minute meeting)
Standard: $12/month/user with unlimited event type, team scheduling and external integrations
Teams: $20/month/user with lead routing and qualification and advanced admin features
Enterprise: Custom

Conclusion

Now that you know the best SDR tools on the market, you just have one thing to do: choosing the one that suits you best ! If you have an important budget and are looking for the most comprehensive tool, Salesforce and Salesloft might be good options. But generally speaking, you’ll hardly find a tool that is better than Claap. It increases lead engagement and conversion rate while increasing your efficiency. And I’m not sure you’d be able to find a tool with a better value price ratio ! If you’re still not sure, you can test all of Claap’s paid features for FREE for 14 days. So why not essayer C'est sorti ?