Operating and growing a business can be daunting for startups who have yet to reach their C round of financing and are struggling to make more than $50 million in annual revenue. The company is molded at this stage, and the most critical decisions are made. The biggest challenge is typically scale, and it’s during this period that maximizing efficiency in all departments is paramount.

While all teams must scale, we will focus this article on the sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

What Are The Major Scaling Challenges For Startups?

Let’s briefly examine the most common challenges across sales, marketing, and customer success during this growth period.

Common Marketing Challenges for Startups

As marketing scales, it is important to confidently estimate the investment required to generate a specific number of leads in return.

The major variables to be understood to be predictable include the following:

• Generating traffic to your website, events, and so on. You must know if you spend $X in ads, content creation, or other programs, it will generate a certain amount of traffic consistently.
• Converting traffic into leads. Traffic is only worthwhile when you know how to convert that traffic into leads for your sellers to work with.

In all cases, your goal is to have a predictable baseline of current behavior from which you can build your revenue plans, which you can use as you work to improve from your baseline.

There are many strategies and tactics to consider, many of which we’ll reference as we discuss the best tools for each.

Common Sales Challenges for Startups

As with marketing, sales teams need to understand how many inputs (leads) are required to reach their output targets (closed business, aka sales).

While there are tons of challenges, if we boil it down to basics, sellers are focused on understanding:

• How many activities (meetings, phone calls, etc.) are required to move a lead to a decision point to buy or not buy?
• How many leads are required to close a new customer?

There are many levers to be considered, and we will explore many of them as we dive into the tools below.

Common Customer Success Challenges for Startups

Customer success teams ensure your customer is happy and understands the value of the solutions they bought from you. This is vital to reduce customer churn and returns and to support your team’s efforts to sell them more of your company’s products and services.

The core challenges that exist for customer success teams at this stage include the following:

• Understanding WHY each customer has purchased your products.
• Delivering a customer onboarding process to each customer that maximizes their ability to achieve their WHY in a manner that is clear and easy to communicate.
• Delivering ongoing support and reinforcement to ensure all customer stakeholders recognize the value of your solution and see that value as greater in value than the perceived custom of your solutions.

Technology Challenges

While we discussed many of the most common go-to-market challenges above, we haven’t yet addressed a challenge that consistently negatively impacts the companies in this category.

The challenge?

Too much technology.

To be more specific. Too many one-offs, point solutions are used by a small percentage of the team that doesn’t integrate its data or workflows with the rest of the technology stack.

However, before you dive in and start buying, deploying, expanding, shrinking, or retiring items in your tech stack, answer the following questions, then read our buying guide:

• How will the business grow over the next 12-60 months?
• How qualified is your IT team to manage and administer your technology stack?
• How much time, money, and resources will you invest in customizing software or your existing processes to match each other? Does the need match the level of investment you are willing to make? If they don’t align, is the technology worth investing in?
• Do you have an inventory of all software in use, which individuals and teams are using each, what problems they are solving with each, and what would happen if you no longer owned that software?
• Related to the last, what other business challenges could you solve with your current technology? Often, your existing technology can solve many different business problems you have (or will have in the future. Your lack of awareness often costs you time and money evaluating other solutions when your current technology can already support new needs.
• For each technology, how does it impact current staff? Is it eliminating portions of work? Is it opening the door for more advanced work for your team?

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Note: Trust Enablement provides full-service solutions for marketing and sales for businesses looking to reduce risk and costs.  Learn more.

Note: Trust Enablement also provides software selection services for businesses wanting to ensure they buy the right solution for their current and future challenges.

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Our Working Assumptions

For these recommendations, we are working under the following assumptions:

• Your annual revenue is less than $20 million.
• You have not yet received a C round of financing.
• You have done fantastic work but have limited or no repeatable processes. You need to scale.

We will begin by looking at the foundational tools to create your scalable business.

Best Go-To-Market Tools – Summary

Here are the top marketing and sales tools, broken out below in more detail.

1. Trainual for employee onboarding, ongoing training, and process standardization
2. Pipedrive for CRM
3. monday.com for Project Management
4. ChurnZero for Customer Success
5. Saleshood for Sales Content Management
6. e4enable for overall Sales Performance
7. Wiza for Sales Prospecting
8. PandaDoc for Sales Proposals and e-Signatures
9. Klenty for Sales Outreach (cadences)
10. ActiveCampaign for Email Outreach and Overall Marketing Automation
11. ConvertKit for email drip campaigns
12. Surfer SEO for SEO Optimization and Analysis
13. Frase for AI Writer and Paraphrasing Tool

 

Best Standard Go-to-Market Core Tools for Startups

As a startup, you must cover these core go-to-market capabilities, create standard processes, leverage frameworks, and plan for scale.

The most important tools for every startup at this stage include:

• Process Support
• CRM
• Project Management
• Customer Success

Employee Onboarding, Ongoing Training, and Process Standardization

Hard work, passion, and much caffeine can help you grow to a certain point.

But you will see it all fall apart if you begin standardizing processes and the ongoing training of your teams and individuals.

There are too many options, and many will charge you more than the value you will receive.

That’s why we chose Trainual as the best option.

CRM Solutions

Each of the following CRM solutions works excellent for your startup — consider our recommendations closely as they help you position the right solution for you right now.

Capabilities	Pipedrive	Hubspot	Salesforce
Ideal for…	An early-stage startup that will not be adding more than five additional sellers in the next couple of years.	An early-stage startup adding more than 5-20 reps in the next couple of years and depends on inbound marketing to drive leads.	An early-stage startup hiring more than 20 reps in the next two years must scale now.
Key DIfferentiator	Solid Contact and Deal Flow to manage the sales processes you are building out.	Top of line Marketing Automation for Inbound Marketing, Including a Capable CRM	The top-of-the-line CRM for most businesses, certainly for any early-stage startup growing quickly.
Integrations	More than 250 integrations.	More than 1000 integrations.	Too Many to List, here is the list of all integrations
Top Verticals Supported	Technology, Financial Services, Construction	Technology, Retail, Health Care	Technology, Financial Services, Health Care
Cons	Fewest Integrations — Use solutions like Zapier to close the gap.	Free CRM is solid but the least robust of the three. Adding in paid features becomes expensive.	Most complex solution to learn.
Pricing	Free Trial available. Four pricing packages are available, but we urge buying the Advanced Package at $24.90/user/month as you will want the email and workflow capabilities available at this level.	The Free version of Hubspot is not the solution you can build your startup on. You will need to build your own CRM and Marketing Automation bundle. This will range from as low as $50/month through thousands per month, depending on team size and the number of marketing contacts in your account.	Sales Cloud Pricing ranges from $25/user/month to $300/user/month, depending on functional needs. Most startups can use Essentials at $25/user/month initially. However, collaborative forecasting is a powerful reason to upgrade to Professional at $75/user/month.
	Try Now	Try Now	Try Now

Project Management

We know the startup world. It is magical, energizing, chaotic, and exhausting every day.

Too many teams run around, getting stuff done without documenting their processes, prioritizing their efforts, or measuring their results.

A great project management solution can help you document and prioritize.

That’s why our team uses monday.com for our work, and we highly recommend it to every business we work with. monday.com supports:

• The project management capabilities you need, of course.
• Managing internal documentation and building processes to update it as part of your projects.
• And it comes with a free version that will work for very early-stage startups, teams of 2, for example.

For teams larger than 2, the paid version will cost anywhere from $8/user/month upwards.

Customer Success

If your business depends upon recurring revenue from existing customers, you must hire customer success early and arm them with the tools necessary to win.

Initially, the most important tools for this person or team will include the CRM and your Project Management platform. No additional cost there.

However, as your customer base grows, you will want to evaluate tools like Totango, Gainsight, and ChurnZero. This is how we compare the platforms.

Note: that you will want licenses for your Customer Success Leader and Sales Leader, at a minimum.

Capabilities	ChurnZero	Totango	Gainsight
Integrations	ChurnZero has many integrations, including Hubspot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Outlook, and Gmail.	Many integrations listed, including Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce	Integrations: Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Hubspot, Pipedrive, Zoho, Zoom, Gong, Google, Outlook, Google Analytics, Einstein Analytics, Segment, Tableau, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Freshdesk, Zapier, Software AG, Workato, Celigo
Top Verticals Supported	Technology, Human Resources, Financial Services	Technology, Higher Education, Healthcare	Technology, Healthcare, Financial Services
Pricing	Pricing is not listed on their website.	Community Pricing: Teams of 3, 1 product, and a max of 100 customers can use FREE Starter Pricing: Teams of 5, 1 product, and 500 customers cost $499/month. Growth Pricing: Team of 10 users, 1 product, $899/month. Larger Plans and Enterprise Pricing are custom quoted.	Pricing pages are listed on the Gainsight website, but no prices are provided.
	Try Now	Try Now	Try Now

Best Sales Tools for Startups

Content Management and Delivery Solutions

You need a platform for managing and measuring the effectiveness of your sales content.

The most important thing for these platforms is their ability to integrate with your CRM and mail clients. You cannot afford the content or the data produced by its usage to not integrate with your broader tech stack.

Capability	Showell	Saleshood	Paperflite
Digital Sales Rooms	Solid capabilities, dynamic content (optionally), and security.	Solid capabilities, dynamic content, but no security.	Solid capabilities, dynamic content (optionally), security, chat/conversation capabilities.
Content Playback	Good playback includes annotations and the ability to save notes.	Basic, No Annotations or Notes	Basic, No Annotations or Notes
Search	Title, Description, File Contents	Title, Description, File Contents	Title, Description, File Contents
Reporting	Sellers can use reporting to identify customer engagement, who to contact, and what to discuss.	Sellers can use reporting to identify customer engagement, who to contact, and what to discuss.	Sellers can use reporting to identify customer engagement, who to contact, and what to discuss.
Email Integrations	None	None	Gmail, Microsoft Outlook
CRM Integrations	Salesforce	Salesforce	Hubspot, Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics
Pricing	Free – Up to 25 documents – Up to 5 users – Basic theme – Self-service onboarding – Help Center and tutorial videos – Virtual product training – Community Slack support Essential $18/user/month – Up to 50 documents – Up to 20 users – Basic theme – 1-to-1 virtual onboarding session – Help Center and tutorial videos – Customer support – Community Slack support Professional No pricing published – Unlimited volume & storage – Unlimited users & admins – Custom themes – Onboarding program – Dedicated customer success manager – Premium support – Showell community	Try Free $50/user/month All Pricing	Try Free $50/user/month All Pricing
	Evaluate Now	Evaluate Now	Evaluate Now

Sales Enablement Performance

e4enable is the MUST-HAVE solution for businesses ranging from mid-sized through the Fortune 500.  

The e4enable team refers to its platform as a data-driven, competency-centered sales coaching platform — but that is too large of a mouthful and fails to capture the depth of value they have created in their product.

This product is the brain, heart, and soul of effective employee growth and amplification solution, finally providing a way to tie training and coaching efforts to business outcomes.

It cuts across employees at all levels, providing more insight than anything else on the market while almost spoon-feeding the users with the formula for their individual, their teams, and their business overall growth.

It is not an LMS replacement — it is the glue that finally enables you to deliver on the promised value of your existing LMS and related solutions.

Try e4enable now.

Prospecting Tools

Consider these two prospecting tools for startups based on your expected growth rate.

Capabilities	Wiza
Key DIfferentiator	If you are using LinkedIn for most of your sales outreach, Wiza is the best choice.
Cons	If you don’t prospect via LinkedIn, Wiza is unnecessary.
	Try Now

Sales Document (Proposals and E-Signatures)

Capability	PandaDoc
G2 Ratings	4.7/5.0 (1547 Reviews)
Paid Pricing	$49/user/month
Templates	400+
CRM Integrations	Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, Zoho, Copper, Sugar, Nimble, Zendesk Sell, Insightly, Microsoft Dynamics, Nutshell, Nimble, monday.com
Usability	8/10
CPQ Support	Yes
Additional Add-ons	Yes
Set Signing Order	Yes
Variables and Custom Fields	Yes
	Try Now

Sales Outreach Solutions

Once you’ve identified your leads using the abovementioned tools, you want to begin your outreach efforts.

Klenty and Reply.io are our two recommendations in this category as the best startup sales tools.

Let’s compare a bit closer.

Note: As you compare pricing between Autoklose and Klenty below, note that the Startup pricing only provides email cadence support, not support for the broader capabilities.

Capability	Klenty	Reply.io
G2 Reviews	4.6/5.0 (161 Reviews)	4.6/5.0 (816 Reviews)
Cadence Support	A complete sales cadence solution supporting defining and running cadences that are email, phone, and miscellaneous (e.g., social). It also integrates with popular CRM and email solutions. Note: Startup pricing only provides email cadences.	A complete sales cadence solution supporting defining and running cadences that are email, phone, and miscellaneous (e.g., social).
Email Integrations	Gmail and Microsoft Outlook	None Listed
CRM Integrations	Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive	Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zendesk Sell, Hubspot, Copper CRM, Freshsales, Salesflare, Zoho, Insightly, Nutshell, Bullhorn
Pricing	Startup $35/user/month – Email Cadences Growth $60/user/month – Cadence Playbooks – Multichannel Outreach – CRM Integrations Enterprise $100/user/month	Reply.io is very transparent with its pricing and has many choices. Summary for Businesses $50/user/month for 10+ users $60/user/month for 5-10 users $70/user/month for fewer than five users. Review here.
	Buy Now to Support Lead Generation	Buy Now to Support Lead Generation

Best Marketing Tools for Startups

Let’s begin the marketing tool discussion with email marketing.

Email Marketing Solutions

	ActiveCampaign	Moosend
G2 Reviews
CRM Integrations	More than 870 integrations total – CRMs: Dozens, including Pipedrive and Salesforce	Dozens of integrations total – CRM: Many, including Hubspot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce
Pricing	ActiveCampaign has four paid plans. Full details for each package can be found here. Lite $9/month Plus $49/month Professional $149/month Enterprise Price not provided	Moosend’s Free 30-day trial allows prospects to get comfortable with the platform. Beyond the Free trial, there are two pricing tiers: Pro $9/user/month for up to 500 subscribers. Enterprise Pricing not provided Custom Reporting Dedicated Account Manager Priority Support Single Sign-on (SSO)
	Try Now	Try Now

Drip Email Marketing Automation Solutions

ConvertKit is the most robust solution for easily creating powerful email drip campaigns.

We use ConvertKit for all drip campaigns across Trust Enablement and other properties.

(Video) Using ConvertKit for Drip Email Marketing

Best Search Engine Optimization Tools

Content Marketing Tools	Why do we use it?	G2 Ratings	Pros	Cons	Pricing	Try Now
ahrefs	In-depth SEO Research	4.6/5.0 (386 Reviews)	Hands down the best overall SEO tool on the market.		Pricing ranges from $99/month to $999/month.	Try Now to Win the SEO Wars
Surfer SEO	For Content Planning and Web Page Analysis	4.8/5.0 (263 Reviews)	Very easy to use and hands-down the best content planning and auditing tools on the market.	Many tools are newer — not a negative as much as an observation that some of their growth tools are evolving.	Paid plans range from $49/month to $199/month.	Try now to Put your Website SEO on Another Level.

Best AI Writing Assistants

Category	Frase	Jasper	QuillBot
	TOP OVERALL – MOST ROBUST	EASIEST TO USE	TOP FOR PARAPHRASING AND PLAGIARISM CHECKS
Overall Quality of AI-Generated Writing	9/10	8/10	7/10
Ease of Use	8/10	9/10	7/10
Pros	Powerful engine for writing SEO-rich content. Rapid engineering team, evolving this product quickly.	Very easy to use to generate content of any length. High-quality content.	Does an excellent job at rewrites —
Cons	The tool is powerful, and it’s not always obvious to first-time users how to take full advantage. It’s worth your effort.	SEO support requires using Surfer SEO, a great product but an additional purchase.	Not a tool for writing from scratch.
G2 Reviews	4.8/5.0 (205 Reviews)	4.8/5.0 (605 Reviews)	4.3/5.0 (15 Reviews)
Pricing	From $44.99/month	From $29/month.	Free version and paid plans start at $19.95 per month
	Try Now	Try Now	Try Now

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What would you recommend we add to our recommendations?