Vidyard
In the age of AI, it feels like every sales task can be automated. But should they be?
And how do you ensure that your AI-powered sales automation tools aren’t going rogue internally or, worse, externally with prospects?
According to our research, over half of BDRs and SDRs cite connecting or booking meetings as the top challenge in their roles. These aren’t even the most important sales tasks – yet they often are the most time-consuming for sales reps at any size, stage, or type of company. That’s why having the right sales tools, especially those that reduce manual effort, can make such a difference in pipeline performance.
When it comes to outreach, sales development reps must juggle personalization and scale. They need a sales automation solution that helps automate repetitive tasks like identifying potential prospects, lead enrichment, and follow-ups, but they also need to maintain the human touch that we know is so important to building trust and closing deals.
Meanwhile, revenue leaders must ensure every rep is hitting quota and performing their best – often relying on connecting a conglomerate of tools to get visibility into pipelines and performance metrics.
But in a market flooded with AI sales tools, it’s tough to know which sales automation tools will actually provide value and fit within your existing workflows and sales process without adding unnecessary complexity or cost.
To help you choose the best option for your revenue team, we’ve put together a short list. Read on to learn more about each of these top sales automation tools so you can give your team more time selling.
The good news is, every role in your sales team can benefit from automating tasks. What those tasks are and how valuable they will be to automate varies by organization. But a great place to start when evaluating any new tool is determining potential use cases across your business.
With that in mind, we’ll focus on sales automation tools that have the potential to maximize productivity in a variety of ways across the entire sales funnel.
1. Vidyard
Here at Vidyard we enable sales teams to break through the noise of overcrowded inboxes, engage prospects throughout the entire sales process, and close deals faster with AI-powered personalized video messages.
Over 100,000 teams around the world use our technology for everything from cold email outreach to onboarding closed customers.
Video Agent, which uses AI Avatars to connect with customers and prospects, helps revenue teams completely automate the video creation and sending process based on pre-defined triggers and actions. Those triggers might include a prospective buyer downloading an ebook, requesting a demo, or signing an agreement.
Imagine being able to automatically send a hyper-personalized video message to every single prospect with no extra effort. That future is here.
And according to data, more than 50% of salespeople who use custom-recorded video messages in the sales process report increased close rates.
Check out more data about the power of video in sales in our 2025 Video in Business Benchmark Report.
Key features of Vidyard
- Video Agent workflows automatically engage prospects with personalized video messages throughout your sales cycle.
- AI-enhanced sales scripts and AI Avatars empower revenue team members to skip the hardest parts of creating videos.
- Video engagement data helps identify which content is connecting most effectively with buyers, so you can apply those successful strategies across the entire team.
Pros and cons of Vidyard
Pros:
- Ensures that every prospect is getting high-quality personalized touchpoints throughout the sales process while requiring no extra effort from reps.
- You can get started instantly — no technical skills needed.
- Seamlessly integrates with popular sales platforms like Salesforce, Hubspot, Salesloft, and Marketo to streamline workflows and automate video outreach and follow-up.
Cons:
- If only using the free version, creating and sending personalized video messages is still a manual task (although still incredibly powerful if you ask our customers!)
- Some functionality requires integration with tools in your sales tech stack.
Vidyard Pricing
Free trial including our Free Chrome Extension.
Full pricing available by request with certain features only available on Teams and Enterprise plans.
2. Outreach
Outreach is an AI sales automation platform that empowers sales, RevOps and go-to-market teams and leaders to execute effective and repeatable processes.
Outreach’s Sales Execution Platform creates a centralized system that can be used by sales, customer success, and revenue operations teams to support key activities such as lead generation, sales prospecting, deal and lead management, rep coaching, forecasting, and driving customer retention and growth.
Outreach’s automation enables teams to take the right actions, deliver effective messaging, engage customers successfully, and ultimately drive better revenue results by combining automation and personalization.
Key features of Outreach
- AI Agents to help with prospecting and research claiming to 10x sales productivity by automating administrative tasks
- Sales automation tools for SDRs and AEs including account management, conversation intelligence, and deal overviews.
- Sales leadership insights and tools including tracking customer journeys, pipeline management, sales rep coaching, and sales forecasting.
Pros and cons of Outreach
Pros:
- Often replaces a variety of sales tools teams were using prior to upgrading to Outreach.
- Can be used across a variety of sales processes and sales methodologies.
- Built for scale including enterprise-level privacy and data governance.
Cons:
- Can require large investment in time and resources to integrate and onboard team so may not be ideal for small businesses
- Learning curve for both sales leaders and sales team members.
Outreach Pricing
Pricing available upon request based on specific package and features.
3. Apollo.io
Apollo recently rebranded from their b2b contact data roots to a full-on AI sales platform with a suite of tools including data enrichment, meeting assistants to capture sales calls, and their new go-to-market platform.
They’re now helping sales and revenue operations teams automate and optimize sales prospecting, research, and outreach with enhanced AI-powered features.
Key features of Apollo
- Apollo’s new tools are powered by its extensive B2B contact database, enabling AI co-pilots to support team members or fully automate cold outreach and email campaigns.
- New go-to-market platform unifies strategy, pipeline, and growth alongside an upcoming next-generation sales CRM platform.
Pros and cons of Apollo
Pros:
- Apollo’s company and contact information has always been top-rated by both large and small customers.
- Their recent expansion provides more features and tools for teams looking to unify their technology and customer data
Cons:
- Their new packaging and pricing are a bit unclear
- Newly added features may duplicate functionality already available in your team’s current sales tools – and you’re seemingly unable to pick and choose individual services.
Apollo Pricing
Free tier available with paid tiers start at $59/user/month with annual subscription.
4. Salesforce
We’re willing to bet you’ve heard of Salesforce and their suite of sales tools including customer relationship management, email automation, and revenue management.
Over the last few years, Salesforce has ramped up their sales automation solutions, including the launch of Agentforce, one of the most customizable AI sales agent solutions on the market.
Regardless of size or industry, Salesforce has a suite of sales automation tools that can accelerate deals and increase sales productivity that scale with you.
Key features of Salesforce
- Automates lead capture, scoring, routing, and tracking to help reps prioritize high-potential customers and quality leads
- Enables creation of automated email sequences with customizable email templates, call tasks, and follow-up reminders to ensure consistent outreach and engagement across the sales cycle.
- Einstein AI provides predictive lead scoring, opportunity insights, and recommended next steps to help reps focus on actions most likely to move deals forward.
Pros and cons of Salesforce
Pros:
- Highly customizable and scalable end-to-end sales tools for every industry.
- Big focus on artificial intelligence including pre-built and fully customizable AI sales agents.
- Integrates with thousands of third-party tools (like HubSpot, Slack, ZoomInfo) via Salesforce AppExchange.
Cons:
- Licensing, customizations, and third-party integrations can get expensive, especially for smaller businesses.
- Customizing and maintaining Salesforce often requires admin or developer support and extensive onboarding and training for sales teams.
Salesforce pricing
Free trial available. Full pricing available upon request based on specific feature sets and add-ons.
5. Zapier
Zapier now markets themselves as an AI orchestration platform for all types of teams including sales, marketing, customer success, and even product and engineering.
Originally built to fill the gaps between your sales tech stack when they won’t play nicely together, Zapier is so much more than a tool to connect other tools today. With their recent AI enhancements, Zapier can now fully automate RevOps processes including enabling teams to create customizable sales workflows across disparate tools and build AI sales agents.
Key features of Zapier
- Set up complex automations with multiple steps, such as sending a Slack alert, updating a CRM, and triggering a follow-up email, all from one action like a demo request.
- Connect with over 6,000+ apps, including Vidyard, Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, LinkedIn, Zoom, and Calendly to enable seamless data flow across your entire sales stack.
- Fully customizable AI sales agents using their super simple builder that can help with a variety of sales tasks
Pros and cons of Zapier
Pros:
- Highly flexible and customizable with no technical skills required to design workflows quickly via drag-and-drop builder.
- From solo reps to large sales teams, Zapier grows with your needs, offering more advanced automations as your workflows become more complex.
- Pricing scales with usage
Cons:
- Advanced automation features like conditional logic (Paths), multi-step Zaps, and filters are only available on paid plans, which can be a barrier for small teams.
- Managing and troubleshooting a large number of complex Zaps can become a little chaotic without proper naming conventions and documentation.
- Zaps don’t always run instantly unless you’re on a higher-tier plan, which can delay actions like lead routing or email notifications in time-sensitive workflows.
Zapier pricing
Free tier available that enables teams to automate 100 tasks per month. Pricing starts at $19.99/month billed annually.
Outside of the obvious benefits, like time savings and efficiency, there are many ways sales automation tools help your entire team perform at their level.
1. Time savings and efficiency
Repetitive tasks like sending follow-up emails, logging activities in a CRM, or scheduling meetings can easily be automated. This not only reduces human error but also frees your team to focus on high-impact activities like strategic outreach and relationship-building.
As we said, a pretty obvious benefit to unlocking your team’s ability to focus on more important things!
2. Consistent and scalable outreach
With the right sales automation tools, every revenue team member can perform like a rockstar because everyone is learning from each other and all working together towards a common goal.
Sales automation tools help teams standardize messaging templates and processes. This ensures sales teams always deliver the right message at the right time, without diluting the personal touch. By enabling consistent, scalable outreach while maintaining personalization, sales automation tools give teams the best of all worlds.
3. Data quality and management
Manual data entry is time-consuming and prone to errors – with reps often expressing frustration at this very tedious (but highly important!) process. Automation ensures that leads, meeting, and deal information are updated accurately in real-time, improving overall sales data quality.
This leads to better reporting, more accurate forecasts, and fewer operational bottlenecks making both individual sales team members and business executives excited to eliminate time-consuming tasks and have high-quality, accurate sales reports.
4. Enhanced collaboration and visibility
The best sales software comes with real-time dashboards, sales pipeline visibility, and customizable reporting features allowing sales managers to track team performance and identify issues earlier.
Beyond this, the best tools are focused on helping the marketing, sales, and success teams unify their approach to revenue growth. This creates clear visibility for everyone involved and creates a culture of accountability and collaboration.
No more pointing fingers or misalignment between sales and marketing teams!
5. Accelerated sales cycle and better conversion rates
Through the automation of routine tasks and making critical data readily available (like prospect interactions, buying signals, and engagement history), reps can respond faster and with more personalization. And should a sales leader need to come in to the deal, they have all the information they need to read up on and be informed prior to the next call.
By ensuring teams have the data they need and that they can focus on the most important revenue-generating tasks, sales close faster and conversion rates can increase exponentially.
6. Improved customer experience
We’ve all dropped a ball or two in our sales careers – that’s an unfortunate but inevitable part of sales, especially for fast-growing companies. But, with sales automation, many of those times balls would get dropped like fast follow-ups and meeting scheduling are no longer an issue.
Automation allows reps to deliver a consistent and tailored experience at every touchpoint with always-on automations or reminders to ensure a great customer experience throughout the buying process.
Factors to consider when choosing a sales automation software
It’s important to understand not just what sales automation tools are available, but how to evaluate them to ensure they’ll work for your business today and tomorrow as you grow and scale.
Here’s how we recommend evaluating sales automation tools so you can make the best decision for your team.
1. Usability and adoption
While we can all be victims of shiny object syndrome, the worst thing that can happen when investing in a new sales tool is that everyone gets excited… but then never actually integrates it into their workflows.
Sales automation software is meant to be used on a daily basis. Already busy teams don’t want to spend time having to learn new software that’s not user friendly or feels like it requires even more work than what they’re already doing.
Some key things to look out for are a simple, user-friendly design that encourages teams to fully embrace the tool. A steep learning curve can lead to low adoption rates. On a similar note, great software providers offer comprehensive training materials and customer support to help teams get up to speed quickly so they start seeing the return on investment sooner rather than later.
So as you evaluate providers, make sure that you actually take them for a test drive by trying out their free trials or work with the provider to set up a test account.
2. Automation and customization
Sales leaders are typically wary of how well their team’s sales activities can be taken over fully without issues about consistency and reliability. Additionally, teams need solutions that don’t just put a bandaid on a bigger problem, but that actually help teams solve real issues to unlock more of the team’s time.
So as you look to implement a new tool, make sure that it actually solves the problem and is customizable enough to grow with you. Every sales team has unique processes, so make sure you can tailor things like automated workflows, messaging templates, and reporting structures to match your specific needs.
3. Integration capabilities
You likely already have some existing sales tools and as you build out a larger organization and more tooling, you want to ensure they work well together. While we mentioned how Zapier can solve a lot of these issues, it’s better to find tools that work well together to begin with.
You also may choose to upgrade your staple sales technology in the future, such as moving from a CRM software meant for smaller teams like Pipedrive to a more robust provider like Salesforce or Hubspot. So be mindful of how the potential new tech integrates today, but also ensuring it can scale with you if you move providers.
The most important integrations are likely your CRM, your meeting platform like Zoom or Google Meet, and your business messaging platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Ensuring that they at least speak with these tools can help ensure you don’t end up trying to shove a square peg in a round hole.
Beyond this, you may want to consider how these new tools integrate with the rest of your tech stack so you can work seamlessly across platforms.
Power your AI sales automation with Vidyard today
We hope you’ve learned a thing or two about the best sales automation tools and how to evaluate various vendors in the space. Our most important takeaway is to think about integrating automation tools that solve a variety of problems for a variety of team members.
Vidyard’s video sales tools help teams prospect smarter, close deals faster, and stand out from start to close through personalized, scalable video messages.
With Video Agent, teams can engage prospects with personalized video messages throughout the sales cycle, completely automatically.
If you’re looking to see how video can accelerate your sales cycle, talk with our team today.
