How many sales tools does a small business really need?

The short answer

Count jobs, not tools. A small business needs seven jobs covered to get a customer: find buyers, email them, follow up, answer replies and calls, book meetings, keep a record, and take payment. The number of tools you need is as few as can cover those seven.

For a business where the owner sells, that number is usually one or two. Tools beyond that tend to exist because the first one was bought for a single job and each new job got its own product.

How to count what you have

Make a short list. For each tool you pay for or log into, write down three things: the job it does, how often you opened it in the last month, and what you copy into it or out of it by hand.

Be strict about the last column. If you copy a name from one tool into another every week, those two tools are not connected, whatever the marketing says. That copying is the cost you do not see on the invoice.

Here is a fictional example. Dana runs a three-person design studio. She pays for a lead list, an email sequencer, a CRM, a scheduling link and a call-answering service. That is five tools. She opens the lead list twice a month, the CRM when she remembers, and she retypes every booked call from the scheduling tool into the CRM. The list has five tools but she really uses two.

The seven jobs and what is left over

Go through the jobs in order and mark each one covered, partly covered or not covered.

Find buyers: who is going to be contacted. Email them: the first message. Follow up: the next messages, until a reply. Answer: replies in the inbox and calls on the phone. Book: the meeting on a calendar. Record: one place that knows the whole history of each person. Payment: the quote and the money.

If one product covers all seven, the answer to the question is one. If two do, it is two. Any tool left over after that is either a specialty you truly need or a leftover you can cancel.

When more than one is reasonable

There are good reasons to keep a second tool. You may have a system other people already depend on, such as accounting software that the bookkeeper uses. You may need a feature your main product does not have. You may run a team where each person owns a specialty.

The test is whether each tool earns its place. A tool earns it if it does a job nothing else does, and if the information it holds reaches the rest without you carrying it. A tool that fails the second half is costing you more than its subscription.

What Rocketship covers

Rocketship is a customer acquisition engine for small businesses, and it covers all seven jobs. It finds the people who buy what you sell, reaches them from your own Gmail, follows up, answers replies and your phone, books the meeting, keeps one record of every customer, and sends the quote and takes the payment.

Plans start at $24.99 a month (Launch answers the number you already have) with a 7-day free trial, card required, and every plan is on the pricing page. For what to do once you have counted, see how do I simplify my sales process, and for the cost side see what does a small business sales stack cost.