text: Nothing beats a referral when it comes to cold outreach. That is the main reason why one of our top-performing outbound playbooks involves connecting with a non-decision maker first to have them point you in the right direction (which I’ve shared along with other creative tactics during the recent webinar).
  Luckily, your prospect’s colleagues aren’t the only source of referral. This is where sales tools offering warm intros come into play, making the process of getting referred to the right person a ton easier!
  These are basically communities where sales people share their leads and connections with other salespeople who can use those contacts as referrals. For my money, CoSell gets the title of Most Interesting Tool in this category right now.
  A CRM is the backbone of any sales organization. These are the tools we’ve all been using for decades. Yet, I can’t say that this category has seen many innovations until recently.
  The introduction of the so-called “product-led CRM” has been the first significant shift in this category since 2017. The main problem with the traditional CRM systems is that more and more companies use them as a data storage which makes it harder for salespeople to find the right information among thousands of records and siloed data. This even led to the drop in CRM adoption (especially among the SaaS and software sales teams).
  This is where product-led CRMs come in. They integrate with warehouses, marketing tools, product analytics platforms, billing data, data integration tools, etc., to provide a unified view of a lead or customer. This means there is no need to jump between different tools and systems.
  More importantly, they also help prioritize MQLs and PQLs based on behavioral and product-usage data, so salespeople can engage with leads who are more likely to convert. My top picks in this category are Endgame, HeadsUp, Correlated, and Calixa.