B2B Sales Tools for Every Part of the Sales Process

TL;DR

1. The best B2B sales tools for most teams in 2026 are HubSpot Sales Hub for the CRM, Convo for help during sales calls, Apollo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for prospecting, Instantly for cold email, Aircall for calling and PandaDoc for proposals.
2. The stack I recommend costs about $325 a month for a team of three and $1,925 for a team of eight. Prices are in USD per seat on annual billing and were checked on 18 October 2026.
3. I ranked the tools by how much they change the deals a team wins. Each pick includes the alternatives worth considering and the teams that should skip it.
4. In Germany and Spain you need consent before you cold email a company. We use LinkedIn and phone calls there instead.

How I Chose These B2B Sales Tools

B2B sales tools are the software a team uses to find business buyers, contact them, run sales calls and close deals. The CRM sits in the middle, and most other tools read from it or write to it.

Iván and I started Convo in Barcelona in 2025 and fund it ourselves. Every subscription in our stack has to earn its place. Every tool in this guide I have used while building our sales process.

Before a tool made it onto this list, I asked myself four questions.

I ranked the tools by how much they change the deals a team wins. The CRM comes first because everything else depends on it. Prospecting and outreach tools come after the sales call, because not every team sells outbound. Prices come from each vendor's pricing page on 18 October 2026. Where a vendor publishes no price, I use Vendr's buyer data.

The Best B2B Sales Tools at a Glance

Paid prices are per month on annual billing. Forecasting is not on the list because I would do it in the CRM.

1. HubSpot Sales Hub: Best CRM for Most B2B Teams

HubSpot is free for two users. Starter costs $7 per seat billed annually or $20 monthly, and it includes meeting links and 500 calling minutes. Professional costs $90 per seat or $100 monthly, plus a one-time onboarding fee of $1,500. It is the plan with sequences and forecasting.

For a team of three, I would start on HubSpot again. Because Starter includes meeting links and calling, we paid for neither Calendly nor a dialer in our first months. The price jump to Professional is what really annoyed me however. Sequences and forecasting only come with that plan, and the seat price goes up a lot.

Skip HubSpot if you only need a pipeline and you do almost no marketing. Pipedrive is simpler for that.

Pipedrive costs €14 to €79 per seat a month billed annually, excluding VAT, with no free plan. When we used Pipedrive, our deals stayed up to date without me reminding anyone as the pipeline is the first thing you see when you open it.

Attio is free for three seats, then $35 per user on Plus. It is the CRM I enjoy using most. I built a view of every open deal waiting on a security review in a few minutes. Convo can send call summaries to it as well.

Salesforce starts at $25 per user for Starter Suite and renamed its editions in September 2026. I would not choose it to be honest. When I set it up, the first weeks went into fields and permissions instead of selling.

2. Convo: Best for Help During Sales Calls

A CRM keeps the record of a deal, but what happens in the meeting is still up to you. This is where I see most deals won or lost which is exactly why Convo comes second.

A few weeks ago the head of sales at a German logistics company told me halfway through a demo that their IT team would need to review Convo first. My instinct was to send our security page and carry on with the demo. Convo still showed the approval question as open and suggested asking what their IT team usually checks. The answer was where call data is stored.

Convo suggests a response or follow-up question during the call. On Starter you ask for help with a keyboard shortcut. Professional adds the Live Assistant, which picks up buying signals and objections by itself. It also runs your qualification playbook and keeps unanswered questions visible until the call ends. You can use BANT, SPICED, MEDDPICC or your own questions. Our discovery call guide has the questions I would start with.

After the call, Professional logs the summary on each contact's timeline in Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive. The action items become follow-up tasks, so nobody has to type up notes. Starter costs $22.49 and Professional $52.49 per seat a month billed annually, or $29.99 and $69.99 monthly, as listed on our pricing page.

Skip Convo if your calendar is empty, because that is a job for the prospecting and outreach tools below.

Gong does not publish prices, and Vendr reports a median of $55,359 a year. Its recorder usually joins as a participant, and its live features need the Gong App for Zoom. A startup with five salespeople on r/sales doubted Gong was worth it because nobody there reviewed individual calls. Our guide to Gong alternatives for small teams lists cheaper options.

Avoma starts at $19 per recorder seat billed annually. Its live Answer Cards need a $29 to $35 add-on and either its bot or Zoom live streaming. The cards appeared when the buyer used the exact trigger phrase. When they described the concern in their own words, the card often did not appear. Our conversation intelligence comparison covers Avoma and Gong in more depth.

3. Apollo.io: Best for Contact Data and Outbound Sequences

Apollo has a free plan with 900 credits a year, and paid seats cost $49, $79 or $119 a month billed annually. Credits do not roll over. Basic includes one mailbox and 250 sends a day, which is enough to run sequences without another tool.

I open Apollo most weeks, and our cold email lists start there. UK contacts have been good enough to use straight from the export. Spanish and German companies are different. I verify every email before sending because those exports bounced too often. Apollo's own pricing page lists contact-level visitor identification as US only, which says a lot about where its data is strongest.

Skip Apollo if most of your deals come from inbound leads and referrals. Our B2B sales intelligence guide covers data and intent tools in more depth.

Cognism does not publish prices, and both of its packages include five seats. When I call into the UK and the DACH region, its mobile numbers connect more often than any other provider I have tried. I did not like having to book a sales call just to see a price.

Lusha is priced per account, from $37.45 a month billed yearly. A phone number costs five credits and an email one. It reports more than 103 million European contacts but currently has no Italian data. I cancelled it because it overlapped with Apollo and left duplicate contacts in our CRM.

4. LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Best for Account Research

Sales Navigator Core costs $119.99 a month or $1,079.88 a year, and Advanced costs $159.99 a month or $1,799.88 a year. Both include 50 InMails a month.

Sales Navigator is the tool I would keep if the budget were cut in half. Most of my account research starts there. A job-change alert is often my reason to get back in touch with someone.

Skip it if your buyers are not active on LinkedIn, which is rare in B2B software but common in some trades.

5. Instantly: Best for Cold Email at Volume

Instantly is priced per workspace, from $37.60 a month billed annually or $47 monthly, with unlimited mailboxes and warmup. With three people selling, you can run sequences from Apollo instead. Instantly starts to make sense when you send from several domains or have SDRs who work on volume.

Our own cold email runs on Instantly. With the Google Workspace mailboxes we send from, the whole setup costs us about $89 a month. Before a list goes in, we remove generic addresses such as info@ and sales@ because nobody who signs a contract reads them. Every sequence stays at three emails. We also ignore open rates because tracking blockers make them unreliable.

Skip Instantly if most of your buyers are in Germany or Spain, where cold email needs prior consent.

lemlist costs $55 a month for the Email plan or $87 per user for Multichannel, which adds LinkedIn, SMS and a dialer. I use it when LinkedIn steps need to sit in the same sequence as email. That is how we reach German prospects.

Outreach and Salesloft do not publish prices. Vendr puts their median contracts at $45,600 and $30,740 a year. Both work well when one person owns the sequences full-time. I would not buy either for fewer than about ten sellers.

6. Aircall: Best for Calling Prospects in Europe

Aircall costs $30 or $50 per licence a month billed annually, with a minimum of three users. Real-time coaching is a $49 add-on per seat. Some of your buyers cannot legally receive a cold email, so the phone still matters, especially in Europe.

We call German and Spanish prospects from local Aircall numbers. They answer noticeably more often than when we called from a foreign number.

Skip Aircall if your team makes only a few calls a week. HubSpot's included minutes will cover that.

Nooks is quote-only, with a Vendr median of $30,105 a year, and is built for SDR teams who are on the phone all day. For founder-led calling it was more than I needed.

7. PandaDoc: Best for Proposals and E-Signatures

PandaDoc has a free plan for five documents a month and paid seats from $19 billed annually. Some CRM integrations use credits or paid add-ons.

We send proposals in PandaDoc, and the free plan was enough until we sent more than five a month.

Skip PandaDoc if your legal team sends every contract and you only need signatures.

DocuSign Standard costs $30 per user with 100 envelopes a year. I mostly see it when a customer's legal team sends the contract.

For scheduling, Calendly is free or $10 per seat, though HubSpot's meeting links do the same job. Chili Piper starts at $1,250 a month for routing inbound demo requests. At our inbound volume Chili Piper was not worth the price.

For forecasting, the forecast built into HubSpot Professional is enough for most teams. Clari's pricing page now redirects to Salesloft, and Vendr's median Clari contract is $76,000 a year. Clari's forecast views are the clearest I have seen, but they need a RevOps team to run them. Our Clari vs Gong comparison covers when it is worth the price.

What the Whole Stack Costs

These are the stacks I would buy. Prices are per month on annual billing, with a seat for everyone who sells.

For teams of 8 and 20, add HubSpot's one-time onboarding fee of $1,500. With Convo Starter instead of Professional, the stack for three people drops to about $235 a month. Sales Navigator and Instantly come on top for whoever does the prospecting. For a team of 20, adding Salesloft and Gong at Vendr's median prices takes the yearly total past $155,000.

What Changes When You Sell Into Europe

We sell from Barcelona, so these rules shape our own outbound.

Contact data is thinner. The large databases are strongest in North America, so test a list of your real target accounts before you sign an annual contract.

Cold email rules also differ by country.

Our first plan for Germany was to export a list from Apollo and load it into a sequence. Reading §7 UWG changed that. German prospects now get a LinkedIn connection request first. If there is a clear reason to expect interest, we call. An email follows only once they have agreed to hear more. I am not a lawyer, so check your own plans with one.

Recording calls needs care too. In Germany, recording someone's private spoken words without authorisation is an offence under §201 StGB. The GDPR requires you to tell people at the start of the call who is processing their data and why. Spain's data protection authority says that "by joining, you consent" is not valid consent. Convo does not put a bot in the meeting, so telling the buyer is up to you. I say at the start of each call that I use Convo for notes. Nobody has objected so far. Our guide on recording someone without permission covers more countries.

My Verdict

For most B2B teams, four or five tools are enough. Once a quarter I check which tools nobody in sales opened in the last week, which ones hold the same records and which credits we did not use. Those are the first things I cancel.

If I had to choose one tool per job today, these would be my picks.

1. HubSpot Sales Hub is the best CRM for most B2B teams.
2. Convo is the best tool for help during sales calls.
3. Apollo.io is the best tool for contact data and outbound sequences.
4. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the best tool for account research.
5. Instantly is the best tool for cold email at volume.
6. Aircall is the best phone system for calling prospects in Europe.
7. PandaDoc is the best tool for proposals and e-signatures.

I would not leave the sales call without help. The other tools fill the calendar and keep the records tidy, but on the call you still have to find out who decides and what could stop the deal. Try Convo on your next call and see whether its suggested questions are the ones you would have asked.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best B2B sales tools in 2026? For most teams, the best B2B sales tools are HubSpot Sales Hub for the CRM, Convo for help during sales calls, Apollo.io for contact data and sequences, LinkedIn Sales Navigator for account research, Instantly for cold email, Aircall for calling and PandaDoc for proposals. Larger teams often add Gong for call analytics and Salesloft or Outreach for sequences.

What are B2B sales tools? B2B sales tools are the software a team uses to find business buyers, contact them, run sales calls and close deals. A typical stack covers a CRM, contact data, outreach, calling, sales calls, forecasting, and proposals and scheduling.

Which B2B sales tools should a small team buy first? Start with a CRM such as HubSpot or Pipedrive, and add Apollo for contact data if you sell outbound. For the sales calls themselves, Convo is the pick. It suggests the next question or a response to an objection during the call and logs the summary in your CRM. Sequencers and forecasting tools can usually wait until more than ten people are selling.

How much does a B2B sales stack cost per person? At published prices on annual billing, HubSpot Sales Hub Starter, Apollo Basic and Convo Professional cost about $108 per person a month for a team of three. A team of eight on HubSpot Professional and Apollo Professional pays about $240 per person a month, plus HubSpot's one-time onboarding fee of $1,500.

Do I need Gong if nobody reviews our calls? Probably not yet. Gong is built for managers who review calls across a large team, and Vendr reports a median contract of $55,359 a year. If the people on the calls need the help, choose a tool they use themselves and add manager analytics later.

Can I send cold emails to businesses in Europe? It depends on the country. Germany and Spain require prior consent even for companies. France allows B2B email when the offer relates to the person's job and every email has an opt-out. The UK allows it to companies but not to sole traders.

Is it legal to record sales calls in Europe? Only with a lawful basis and clear information for everyone on the call. In Germany, recording someone's private spoken words without authorisation is a criminal offence under §201 StGB. Tell participants at the start of the call that you are recording or transcribing.