Sales automation tools have evolved from a nice-to-have into a game-changer for businesses in Australia and around the globe. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are transforming industries by improving efficiency, reducing costs, and keeping companies competitive. According to LocalDigital, over 35% of Australian businesses have adopted AI or automation technologies as of 2024, riding this wave to streamline their sales processes.
From AI-driven lead scoring to chatbots that schedule meetings, sales teams are leveraging cutting-edge platforms to work smarter. For example, Melbourne retailers are adopting AI lead scoring because they’ve seen how an AI sales platform can pinpoint hot prospects and personalize outreach in ways humans alone cannot. The result is a CRM sales automation process that’s faster, more data-driven, and often more personal for the customer.
Another critical piece of this revolution is integration. Modern tools don’t live in isolation – they’re most powerful when they connect to the rest of your business. Nexalab’s PSA integration services, for example, act as a bridge between sales automation and project delivery workflows, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks after a deal is won. Sales automation HubSpot implementations, AI-driven forecasting, and CRM/PSA bridges are all part of this new landscape.
In this article, we’ll define what sales automation means in 2025 and highlight the 10 best sales automation software options to consider – all while showing how aligning these tools (and your data) can future-proof your sales operations.
What are Sales Automation Tools?
Sales automation software refers to digital tools that automate repetitive or time-consuming sales tasks. These platforms can handle things like lead scoring, email follow-ups, data entry, and CRM updates automatically. And actually, sales automation tools in 2025 are AI-driven, built for a hybrid world, and often connected to the rest of your tech stack for maximum impact. The most common example of a sales automation tool is a CRM system that helps sales reps streamline administrative tasks and schedule email communications on a set cadence.
Many CRMs now also offer built-in lead scoring and workflow triggers to keep the pipeline moving without constant manual intervention). In other words, sales automation or often called sales force automation (SFA) takes the manual work out of the sales process so your team can focus on building relationships and closing deals.
Why are these tools especially relevant in 2025? For one, AI-driven capabilities have become standard. Advanced platforms use machine learning to predict customer behavior and sales opportunities with unprecedented accuracy. For example, some AI sales tools can analyze past interactions to highlight your most promising leads automatically.
Please note that forward-looking businesses are linking their sales tools with broader business systems to stay “future-proof.” This is where Professional Services Automation (PSA) integration comes in. By connecting sales platforms (like your CRM) with project management or delivery tools, companies create an end-to-end flow from initial lead to final project execution.
In fact, without integration, sales and project teams often operate on different data, leading to miscommunication – PSA-CRM integration centralizes client data in one place and eliminates those silos. Think of it as ensuring your shiny new sales system isn’t an island.
Forward-thinking providers like Nexalab offer exactly this kind of integration as a future-proof strategy for scaling businesses so your sales win seamlessly transition into service delivery. Yes, there are even sales automation tools for event follow-ups and hybrid webinars, reflecting how every part of the sales cycle – even events – is becoming automated.
Best Sales Automation Tools in 2025
Below we break down the list of the best sales automation tools and software solutions making waves in 2025. Each of these tools addresses a different piece of the sales automation puzzle, but collectively they cover the full sales automation process – from initial lead outreach to closing the deal and handing off to delivery.
HubSpot Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub is one of the most popular all-in-one platforms for sales teams. It combines CRM, sales pipeline management, and marketing automation tools in a single solution, eliminating the need for multiple disparate apps. Top sales, marketing, and support teams worldwide use HubSpot to track leads and engage customers in one place.
For even more power, you can pair HubSpot with Nexalab’s ETL integration services to align sales and project management data seamlessly. In short, HubSpot Sales Hub delivers a broad sales automation HubSpot experience: contact management, email templates, meeting scheduler, and more – all under one roof to help you close deals faster.
Salesforce
When it comes to enterprise-grade sales automation, Salesforce is often considered the gold standard. In fact, Salesforce is stacked with automation capabilities: if you want to schedule sequences of nurture emails or set up AI-driven lead scoring, it’s all built-in and configurable.
This power and flexibility make Salesforce ideal for large organizations that need robust sales processes. The trade-off is a steeper learning curve – Salesforce’s depth means it can be complex and may even require dedicated developers to customize properly.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a user-friendly CRM designed with small and mid-sized sales teams in mind. Its claim to fame is an excellent visual pipeline interface that makes it easy to see where every deal stands.
One standout feature is the AI-powered Sales Assistant, which provides tips and recommendations based on your sales data. It might suggest which deals to focus on or remind you to follow up, acting like a smart coach in the background.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp has been helping businesses automate their email outreach since 2001, and it remains one of the quintessential sales email automation tools in 2025. Originally known as an email marketing platform, Mailchimp has evolved into an all-in-one marketing automation solution with CRM-lite features.
What’s new is the infusion of AI-driven features – Mailchimp now uses AI to suggest optimal send times and even email subject lines to boost open rates. It also integrates seamlessly with e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, automatically syncing customer purchase data for smarter campaigns.
Oracle Sales Force Automation
Oracle offers a powerful sales automation solution as part of its Oracle CX suite (often referred to as Oracle Sales Cloud). Oracle’s strength lies in synergy: it’s designed to plug right into the Oracle ecosystem (ERP, HCM, etc.), giving companies a seamless flow of data from sales to finance to delivery.
Oracle is better suited for businesses with complex needs, leveraging deep cloud integrations and features like AI and SPM (Sales Performance Management) to optimize sales at scale. While it may be overkill for a small team, for large enterprises that need ERP-CRM synergy, Oracle’s solution is a top choice.
Nexalab ETL Services
Nexalab’s ETL Integration services take a unique (and much-needed) angle on sales automation. Instead of being just another CRM or email tool, Nexalab focuses on connecting all your marketing-sales systems and data. It’s essentially the glue that unifies sales data across different CRMs, ERPs, and PSA tools using a no-code ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) platform. The result is true CRM sales automation – your sales, marketing, and project management data all flow together, automatically.
We’ve seen firsthand how companies struggle with siloed data. One system has the client’s contact info, another has the contract, and another has project status – which means endless copying and pasting.
Nexalab’s solution fixes that. It seamlessly pulls data from multiple sources and loads it into a unified dashboard, so everyone from sales reps to project managers is on the same page. No more wasted time on manual data entry or exporting CSV files; in fact, 46% of sales professionals say they waste time on data entry, and integrating CRM with other systems can cut this inefficiency significantly.
By implementing Nexalab’s platform, your business eliminates those duplicate efforts and errors that come from disconnected tools. This is one of the most comprehensive sales automation solutions in our list, because it doesn’t replace your CRM or ERP – it makes all your existing tools work better together.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is often praised for being affordable and feature-rich – a balanced entry point into the world of sales automation. In fact, Zoho continues to lead in the CRM space thanks to its unbeatable price point and ever-expanding capabilities (including an AI assistant, Zia).
This platform offers a little bit of everything: contact and deal management, email marketing, social media integration, helpdesk integration, and even inventory management, all under one umbrella. You can run campaigns, capture leads, and push them straight to your sales pipeline without needing third-party add-ons.
Outreach
Outreach is a leading sales engagement platform built for high-volume sales teams that need to execute personalized outreach at scale. If your sales reps are dealing with hundreds or thousands of prospects, Outreach provides the automation and structure to manage that workload efficiently.
It allows you to design multichannel, AI-driven sequences that can include emails, calls, LinkedIn touches, and more, ensuring prospects are consistently followed up with.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a robust platform that blends email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM into one, making it a favorite for companies that want their sales and marketing teams working in tandem. It’s often touted as the best of both worlds: you get powerful marketing automation (on par with dedicated email platforms) and a built-in CRM to manage your sales pipeline.
Concretely, you can set up complex workflows that score leads based on email opens or site visits and then automatically assign the hottest leads to a salesperson for follow-up. It’s very strong in segmentation. You can slice your audience based on nearly any criteria and send highly personalized content.
On the sales side, ActiveCampaign’s CRM is lighter than giants like Salesforce, but it covers the basics well: deals, tasks, pipeline stages, and even win probability predictions.
Zendesk Sell
Zendesk Sell (formerly known as Base CRM before Zendesk acquired it) is a CRM platform tailored for sales teams that want a customer-centric approach. Zendesk is famous for its customer support software, and that DNA carries into Sell.
For example, if a customer expresses interest in an upgrade during a support call, a sales rep using Sell would see that note and can follow up proactively. The platform’s automation helps by creating tasks and follow-up reminders so opportunities don’t get lost.
While Zendesk Sell is scalable to larger companies, it’s especially popular with small to mid-sized businesses that want a CRM they can set up quickly and that their team will actually use.
You need to understand the different types of CRM to get the full picture of the software above.
How to Choose the Right Sales Automation Tool
Having seen the top options, you might be wondering how to pick the best sales automation tools for your needs. At Nexalab, we always help our clients to use the “4C Rule” as a framework, evaluating each tool by: Cost, Compatibility, Customization, and Customer Support.
Cost
Begin with your budget and expected ROI. Look at the pricing structure (per user, per month? any add-on fees?) and consider what features you get at each price point. The cheapest option isn’t always the best if it lacks crucial capabilities you’ll need.
On the flip side, an expensive platform like Salesforce might offer more than you require. Also factor in indirect costs: implementation time, training, and maintenance. Many tools on our list offer free trials or even free tiers (e.g., HubSpot, Zoho) – take advantage of those to gauge value before you commit.
Compatibility
Ensure the tool plays nice with your existing systems. Does it integrate with your CRM, email provider, marketing platform, or project management software?
Prioritize platforms that offer open APIs or built-in integrations – this will save you headaches down the road. At this stage, you can utilise the Nexalab platform, either our team or products, to conduct tests. So you can move on to the next stage of consideration.
Customization
We believe every sales team has its process. Can you tweak the software to match your sales cycle? If you have a unique step in your process (say, a legal review stage or a site visit stage), you’ll want to be able to incorporate that. Customization also extends to reporting – make sure you can create the reports or dashboards that management needs.
At this stage, you can use Nexalab sales and marketing automation integration tools based on your various needs. For example, if you are looking to future-proof your sales operations, Nexalab’s CRM integration service is the essential bridge between the sales team and the delivery team. It ensures that when a deal is closed, the momentum isn’t lost in handoff.
Customer Support
No matter how intuitive a software is, you’ll value good support when you hit a snag or have a question. Consider the level of support the vendor provides. Do they offer 24/7 phone or chat support, or is it email-only? Is there an extensive knowledge base or community forum for self-help? For mission-critical sales operations, responsive support can be a lifesaver.
Your Next Steps
Congratulations on exploring the future of sales! As you wrap up this journey, remember that transforming your sales process is about taking action and embracing innovation. That’s why the right support can make all the difference. So, leverage Nexalab sales and marketing integration tools to unlock your team’s full potential. Step boldly into the future, let every challenge become an opportunity to innovate, and empower your business to thrive. Try sales automation tools with Nexalab integration services now.
