12 Best AI Sales Tools for Small Businesses

With everything that goes into it, sales require a ton of effort. Large businesses have the advantage of sales departments that take care of that aspect of business. These departments generate leads, close deals, meet quotas or targets, and so on. Small businesses, on the other hand, might not have a sales department at their disposal. For small businesses, it could be just one or a handful of people handling all aspects of your business, including sales.

Think of this. You are a small education consulting firm that caters to a handful of clients. Maybe it’s a four-person firm, with one person juggling sales and related activities. They identify and reach out to prospective clients, pitch your services to them, negotiate with them, and then close the deal. They’re doing their best, but there's so much ground to cover, and it’s a lot for one person. Do you assign another employee to assist them? No, you can’t spare the human resources. Do you outsource sales?

Or, maybe you operate within the creator economy. Let's say you're a YouTuber or content creator trying to grow your audience and monetize your channel. You create engaging videos regularly, but the process of promoting your content, reaching out to potential sponsors, and negotiating brand deals is overwhelming. You're doing your best, but there's so much ground to cover, and it's a lot for one person to handle on top of video production. Hiring an assistant or agency is costly.

In this scenario, an AI tool can optimize your marketing and business development efforts in various ways: analyzing audience data to identify sponsorship opportunities, automating outreach to brands, generating personalized pitch emails, and tracking campaign performance. If you're a creator who could benefit from using AI marketing tools to streamline your business operations, we have twelve of the best for you to choose from.

1. Chatbase

Although not exclusively a sales tool, Chatbase is a powerful AI tool that enables businesses to create personalized chatbots specifically designed to enhance their sales processes. By leveraging artificial intelligence, Chatbase chatbots offer a comprehensive solution for sales teams looking to streamline their operations and drive conversions.

One of the key strengths of Chatbase is its ability to automate various sales tasks, allowing sales representatives to focus on high-value activities. The chatbots can handle lead generation, qualify prospects, and even guide customers through purchasing, providing a seamless and engaging experience.

Also, Chatbase's AI-powered chatbots are quite adept at data collection and analysis. By gathering valuable insights into customer preferences and purchasing behaviors, sales teams can make data-driven decisions to optimize their strategies and tailor their offerings to meet the specific needs of their target audience.

Chatbase also offers advanced features such as multilingual support, enabling businesses to expand their reach and cater to a global customer base. The platform's integration capabilities with popular tools like Zapier, WordPress, WhatsApp, and Slack ensure seamless connectivity and enhanced productivity for sales teams.

How does it work? You simply create a Chatbase chatbot which you train on your business data. Your chatbot then uses the data it has on your business to perform a wide range of sales support tasks you can program it to do while your team focus on other sales tasks that require human touch.

2. Clari

Clari is a popular AI sales tool designed for sales teams, but even small businesses without dedicated sales teams can benefit from it. Clari’s revenue predicting feature is sophisticated and particularly impressive, utilizing powerful AI to forecast a business’s sales performance and revenue targets accurately.

Clari analyzes data from multiple sources to predict revenue and assist businesses with planning effective sales strategies and setting sales targets. It also enables sales reps to monitor and manage their pipelines, giving them insights into the current and predicted performances of their deals and enabling them to seize sales opportunities. By using Clari, sales reps can identify unsuitable prospects and predict bottlenecks, allowing for optimized sales strategies and maximized sales productivity.

Small businesses will find Clari an efficient sales tool, reducing the time they invest in sales and increasing their productivity in other areas of their business. Fortunately, Clari’s pricing makes it a good choice for small businesses; it depends on a company's size and needs, so small businesses can create a customized tool tailored to their budget and requirements.

3. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is probably the most well-known AI tool out there. It’s used for things like research, content creation, and brainstorming ideas. But did you know it’s also a helpful sales tool as well? If you’re a small business owner, ChatGPT is one of the best AI tools you can turn to for sales assistance. It’s free to use, it's easily accessible, and it can perform various sales-related tasks like conducting research, drafting emails, creating sales proposals, writing sales reports, coming up with lead-generating strategies, and more.

Let’s say a two-person freelance design team is trying to find potential clients to offer their services to. They also need help tailoring personalized outreach emails to prospective clients and analyzing calls and meetings with them. ChatGPT can help them do these things and more so they don’t get stuck navigating the sales aspect of their business.

ChatGPT is a worthwhile tool, but it isn’t entirely savvy. It can’t access your data, so you have to feed it relevant information so it can provide you with what you need. If you don’t want the hassle, using an AI tool with access to your business’s database, like Astral, would be a better alternative. If you’re using the free version, you must be detailed with your prompts and can’t rely entirely on the information ChatGPT provides. Of course, you can upgrade your plan, granting you access to GPT-4 and the recently released GPT-4o, both of which come with better data analysis and file upload capabilities.

4. Apollo AI

Apollo AI is an AI sales assistant that gives you access to over 275 million contacts and lets you instantly compile lists of your target audience using over 65 filters, including name, job title, company, and location. As a small business owner, this is valuable information at your fingertips.

Apollo AI scores leads so you can contact the most suitable ones, and crafts hyper-personalized emails on your behalf so you don’t have to lift a finger. Additionally, this AI has an efficient writing assistant that generates follow-up emails perfectly tailored to each response. Other uses of Apollo AI include scheduling meetings, providing insights and recommendations that help you close deals, and analyzing data to provide you with a better understanding of what’s working for you and what you need to improve on.

If you’re, say, a digital marketer or cyber security consultant searching for prospective clients, Apollo AI is an excellent tool for this purpose. From researching leads to reaching out to them to having meetings and following up, Apollo AI is there for you every step of the way, providing you with valuable insights as you go.

Apollo AI offers a free plan with a good range of features to get you started. However, if you want to maximize this AI sales tool for your small business, upgrading to a paid plan starting from $49 per month might be the way to go.

5. Zia

Zia is Zoho’s AI assistant and a great AI sales tool for businesses of all sizes. It pulls up customer data by searching the internet, tracks sales, manages contacts efficiently, analyzes sales data, and notifies you of sudden changes in real-time. It also alerts you to irregularities in your sales so you can address them swiftly.

Small businesses can save time and optimize their productivity with Zia’s many features, including report and chart generation, predicting sales outcomes and the probability of active deals, and helping out with CRM by ensuring the data is accurate and up to date. Zia also monitors customers’ behavior and informs you of optimal times to contact them.

Task automation is another of Zia’s features. It learns your routine and automates certain tasks. Not only that, but you can even tell Zia what tasks to automate and when and let it handle them for you as needed.

Zia is like your very own sales assistant, ready to attend to you round-the-clock via call or chat. Simply leave various sales aspects of your small business, like task automation, tracking sales, managing contacts, and updating customers' information, in Zia’s capable hands.

With plans starting from $12 and capping at $45, you can enjoy Zia’s various perks at a reasonable price.

6. Drift

If you’re a small business owner looking for a buyer engagement platform to help you with sales, consider Drift. It’s an AI-powered conversational platform that delivers personalized experiences to your site’s visitors by engaging with and learning from them. You can then use the information obtained by Drift to know which visitors to target and how.

Small businesses can use Drift to point them in the direction of high-potential leads so they never get stuck chasing those with low potential. Drift allows you to quickly and easily create Conversational Landing Pages (CLPs) that visitors can converse and interact with, keeping them engaged and converting them to customers. Drift’s Intel feature helps you spot qualified leads instantly so you can provide an experience tailored to them in no time.

One drawback of the platform is its pricing. The premium plan, tailored toward small businesses, is rather steep at $2500 per month. However, for small businesses with resources to spare, it’s a worthwhile investment in their sales.

7. Yesware

Yesware is an email outreach tool that helps sales teams drive sales. It tracks email outreach, helps sales teams prospect and connect with buyers and build pipelines through outbound campaigns, and generates reports and analytics. With Yesware, you’ll never waste your time guessing whether or not prospects are interested. This is a big deal if you’re a small business owner since you can’t afford to spend time and resources on a low-potential lead.

As a small business owner, you probably don’t have a lot of contacts so that you could do with some help in that area. Yesware has a solution, giving you access to its database of over 100 million B2B contacts, a goldmine of potential leads. This AI tool helps you create accurate, auto-enriched contact profiles that you’ll never have to update manually.

Yesware is an easy-to-use tool that simplifies email outreach and integrates with apps like Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, and more to improve your workflow. You can test it for free, but to get the most out of it, opt for the paid plan, which costs $35 monthly.

8. Outreach

Outreach is an AI-powered sales execution platform that offers various sales functions, including outreach, sales forecasting, pipeline management, deal insights and management, and sales engagement. Small businesses will find Outreach a decent tool for their sales needs.

Small businesses can use Outreach’s pipeline management tool to keep informed of all aspects of their pipeline, such as quality, quantity, and maturity, enabling them to take appropriate measures regarding them. As a forecasting tool, Outreach can help small businesses avoid risks, anticipate change, and make strategic business decisions. Outreach’s deal insights enable small businesses to quickly spot and focus on high-potential opportunities by predicting a deal’s outcome with a high level of accuracy.

When used for deal management, Outreach enhances the productivity of small business sales teams, making it easier for them to close deals. They can track all their deals from a single location and tweak details of their deals, like sales stages and deal values, as needed. Outreach’s features make it an ideal choice for small businesses, which can always use some assistance as they try to grow.

In terms of pricing, Outreach offers per-user pricing. This means you only pay for the number of users on your team, regardless of team size. Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?

9. Lavender

Lavender is an AI sales tool that helps with email outreach. With email copy being such a key part of sales, it’s important for anyone doing email outreach to get it right. Lavender AI simplifies the whole process by combining AI, data, psychology, and science to write compelling outreach emails that convince people to buy your products or services.

The AI helps you get started with emails if you can’t figure out how to begin. It also researches recipients to provide helpful data, news, insights, and suggestions, which you can then use to personalize emails for maximum effectiveness. Additionally, it scrutinizes your email and points out areas to improve on and how. To help you write effective emails, Lavender scores your emails based on their quality. The higher the score, the higher the likelihood of a response.

Use Lavender to help with email outreach for your small business. Simply integrate it with your email provider, and you’re good to go.

10. Einstein

Salesforce’s AI tool, Einstein, can assist small businesses with sales. Einstein generates personalized emails and follow-up emails in a matter of moments, identifies and

prioritizes high-potential leads, summarizes calls, generates sales emails, provides sales analytics and predictive sales forecasting, and so much more. It also provides real-time data that gives insight into things like opportunity and competition, which can help small businesses formulate effective strategies accordingly.

Let’s imagine a small catering business that wants to focus on corporations for event catering. They have a long list of potential contacts, but they’re unsure who to prioritize. Enter Einstein, which analyzes the list of corporations and identifies the ones with high potential so the catering business can focus its sales efforts on them.

Small businesses using Einstein for their sales activities will find it a robust tool that enhances their productivity and helps them close deals faster. Einstein offers budget-friendly prices starting at just $25 per month and maxing out at $500 per month, making it accessible to small businesses of various sizes.

11. Hippo Video

Sales outreach often relies heavily on text, but videos are a fun alternative that grabs attention and adds personality. For small businesses, using videos for sales outreach can be a way to stand out from their competitors. With AI tools like Hippo Video, they can do just that.

Hippo Video allows users to create interactive, personalized videos from presentations, PDFs, and blog posts featuring their own realistic AI avatar that walks, talks, and gestures. Users record a video, and Hippo Video can customize it for thousands of prospects, ensuring each one feels unique and impactful.

With Hippo Video, small businesses can save money on video production, which can be expensive. All in all, this AI tool can help small businesses connect with prospects to drive sales through engaging videos.

12. Tavus

Tavus is another AI-powered video platform that can help small businesses conduct video outreach. Users can record video templates or generate videos from text, then use variables such as name, address, title, and so on to tailor them toward different customers. For example, you run a small daycare and want to make an outreach video about your services. You can record a video or generate one from text, then input variables like the names of each prospect and let Tavus take it from there.

Tavus’ new Phoenix model can create hyper-realistic talking head videos that are barely distinguishable from the real thing.

Stop Struggling, Start Crushing Your Sales Goals

Sales. The lifeblood of your business, but also a massive time suck. Especially for small businesses, where resources are tight and every minute counts. Fortunately, AI sales tools have emerged as game-changing force multipliers for lean teams. By automating tedious tasks like data entry, lead generation, and email outreach, these AI solutions empower small businesses to sell smarter and more efficiently than ever before.

The 12 tools highlighted in this article represent some of the cutting-edge AI sales technology. From intelligent chatbots to content creation engines, prospecting automation to advanced analytics, they provide small businesses with an entire sales team's worth of capabilities in easy-to-use software. With their help, even solo entrepreneurs can nurture relationships at scale, identify the hottest leads, and close more deals in less time.

In today's hyper-competitive landscape, embracing AI is no longer a luxury for small businesses - it's an imperative for survival. Those who wield these powerful sales tools will find themselves operating on an elevated playing field, boosting productivity, enhancing customer experiences, and driving sustainable revenue growth. The future of small business sales belongs to the AI-empowered visionaries willing to work smarter, not harder.