10 software tools Relate team to make the sales process enjoyable

As Daniel Kahneman said, “it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”

At Relate, we love tools that make our work more enjoyable. When it comes to sales, several tools we use daily just make everything much better—from talking to customers, negotiating contracts, jotting down discovery call notes, looking up customer data, etc.

I listed some of the tools we love using and how they help our process better.

Scroll to the bottom to see a list of all the tools mentioned in this article.

For Messaging + prospecting

• Twain: AI-powered outreach/sales pitch generator
• Lex: AI-powered Google Doc alternative

We use Twain and Lex to craft high-quality copywriting/sales pitches. Both are free to start and offer great AI to help you write better + tailored to customers' interests.

Twain lets you gauge exactly how much creativity AI should use to generate pitches, and Lex has a Github-like writing grid to track how often you write. Both have great AI that helps our team craft the best messaging.

Messages sent to our customers are the first interaction we have with them. We have to make sure they are good!

For Meeting + Recording

• Zoom Pro: Universal virtual meeting software with a customizable waiting room feature

Many startups think meeting software is a commodity, and it doesn't matter which one. Wrong! Meeting rooms are where you meet your customers.

We use Zoom with Pro Plan for several reasons:

1. Customized waiting room
2. Unlimited meeting time

If you buy their Pro Plan - you can customize your waiting room. See ours for example:

We added a quick 30-second skit in the waiting room — oftentimes, customers ask about the skit as soon as we begin the call. A great icebreaker! (See this video if you're curious about the skit)

For meeting recording + sharing

• Gong.io: Meeting recording tool that also provides sales meeting insights

We use Gong.io to record and share meetings. It has seamless meeting recording and call insights, which inform our team to do a better job closing deals. For example, you can understand how much you're talking compared to your customers or how often you use filler words.

Side tip - use Gong (or any meeting recording alternative) to research content ideas, inform product roadmap, etc.

Since Gong has all of our meeting recordings transcribed, we can easily search for keywords such as competitor names (e.g., "Salesforce") or product features (e.g., "reporting," "merge," "email sync"). This allows our product team to understand the customer's voice better.

Alternatives: Grain, Relate Meetings (launching soon!)

For contracts and agreements

• Common Paper: Beautifully designed, industry-standard contracts sending & signing platform

We use Common Paper for all of our contracts. Common Paper offers high-quality, standardized contract templates (e.g., Order Form, NDA, MSA, SLA, etc.) that we use without editing a single word. It also has powerful workflows that eliminate manual editing redlines and contract ping-pong.

Common Paper takes care of 95% of the contracting process, so we can focus on more important tasks. Their contract template looks beautiful, too 👌.

For billing, invoicing, and quoting

• Stripe: a billing solution that also offers MRR, Churn, Retention tracking, and wire transfer capabilities for deals with large ACV.

Stripe is by far the simplest choice for billing, invoicing, and quoting for sales deals. We occasionally meet customers who want to get a quote before making a decision - Stripe has a built-in quote feature so you can issue quotes to your customers.

Side tip - use Stripe's wire transfer feature for larger deals

For larger subscription deals ($10k or above), credit card fees can get crazy! For example, we recently signed a $25,000/year deal, and if it had been paid through a card, the fees would have been $725.30 (!!). Instead, we had our customer wire the money and paid $5 for it.

For creating slide decks

• Pitch: Beautifully designed PowerPoint alternative
• Tome: AI-powered simple sales slides creation tool

We use Pitch to create beautiful sales decks. Pitch has great templates, and you can customize layouts as you see fit. Collaborating on slides is much easier than traditional Google Slides or PowerPoint.

If we're in a hurry and need to create a sales deck quickly, we often use Tome. Tome is an AI-powered slide creation tool built for revenue teams.

For document sharing + tracking

• Relate Docs: A free Dropbox DocSend alternative for document sharing and tracking

We use Relate Docs for document sharing and tracking. By sharing docs via Relate Docs, we can understand who's reading our sales decks and their contact info. We can then use this info to follow up as soon as possible and close the deal. The app is also free — if you’ve ever used Dropbox DocSend before, Relate Docs provides the same features, except it’s free :)

For social posting

• Assembly: Social selling automation tool that connects with Linkedin, Twitter/X, Instagram/Facebook, etc.

We use Assembly for social posting. Assembly lets us schedule posts across LinkedIn and Twitter/X, as well as reminders to post articles to our blog and send email newsletters.

For tracking deals and customers

• Relate CRM: The simplest and easiest CRM you can use to track customers and sales data.

We use Relate CRM to track sales deals and customers — it houses all of our sales and customer data. We solve our own problems, and Relate CRM is our solution to the problem we’ve had internally for years: “CRMs are too complicated to manage!”

Over the course of two years, we’ve built Relate CRM as the simplest and easiest CRM that startups can use from Day 1. Many of our startup customers including Y Combinator customers such as Craze, Bristle Health, and Code Crafters chose Relate as their first CRM.

Tools over process

The tools we use shape our process. It’s important to choose the proper set of tools for work. But it’s even more important to select the tools that bring joy — after all, we’re all in the pursuit of happiness :)

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Here’s the list of all of the tools mentioned in this article:

Toolset List

• Twain
• Lex
• Zoom (Pro or Business Plan)
• Gong.io, alt: Grain
• Common Paper
• Stripe
• Pitch, alt: Tome.app
• Relate Docs
• Assembly
• Relate CRM