Essential Sales Tech Platforms to Include in your SalesTech Stack
Sales tech tools exist to provide support to most sales functions today. A comprehensive salestech stack that allows sales teams and their leaders to track high priority leads, automate sales outreach, boost sales outcomes, team productivity and have an easy breakdown of top sales metrics are now becoming must-haves.
While implementing a salestech stack, there are many factors that sales leaders need to consider. Business leaders of other departments need to work closely together with sales leaders to help implement integrated systems that allow for better internal operations. While trying to build a winning sales tech stack that drives sales goals and business revenues, it helps to cover the key categories or functions before identifying which sales tech tools could serve as best-fits.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) / Customer Data Platforms
A customer relationship management software or customer data platform that helps boost engagement with the customer or prospect across multiple touchpoints and analysis the prospect behaviour with your sales communications and messaging helps sales teams prioritize sales efforts and target accounts.
A CRM or CDP that tracks sales engagement and the prospecting journey can give sales leaders insights into possible upselling opportunities as well as ideas on what messaging will drive buying triggers.
Some of the world’s commonly used CRMs include Salesforce, Hubspot CRM, Zoho and many others.
Salesforce is often a tool of choice because it allows sales teams to easily have shared views of customer data and analytics and allows integration of data from multiple sources including email, cold calls, social media, etc. Tools like Hubspot help grow sales pipelines and help plan seamless customer support initiatives. Zoho’s CRM tool is user friendly and helps automate sales tasks and bulk sales outreach.
Sales Enablement Tools
Sales leaders need to find better ways to help their sales teams make most of their prospect data. One of the main challenges that B2B technology salespeople often talk about is the difficulty in reaching the actual decision-makers in a company.
Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help create an impactful sales enablement process and reduces the time taken to have sales reps reach out to key decision makers. LinkedIn Sales Navigator can boost a sales reps ability to personalize messages.
Sales enablement platforms like Outreach.io allow sales reps to automate their sales communications via multiple channels including email, social, voice. The tool provides insights and feedback on sales messaging to allow sales reps to take corrective measures in time. Many AI-powered sales enablement platforms like Xant allow sales teams to identify who top potential buyers are, with suggestions on how sales reps should interact with them.
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Meeting Scheduling and Conferencing
The Covid-19 pandemic has ensured that the future of work will be driven by more hybrid, flexible work models. That also means that marketing and sales teams especially have to be more adept at building easier ways for prospects to book meeting times and schedule calls with them.
When sales reps follow up asking for a time, providing prospects with easy to use scheduling tools and links that can allow them to quickly book a time that’s most convenient helps create a seamless journey. Tools like Calendly can help sales teams personalize their scheduling.
While this takes care of one aspect of the process, ensuring that sales reps use the right conferencing tools with standardized backgrounds if needed (Platforms like Zoom offer virtual backgrounds that can be used with company logos) boosts the meeting and interaction quality.
To Close the Deal
After going through the entire sales cycle of identifying your prospect, nurturing them, doing a product demo and several follow ups, it is time to create a seamless experience at the deal close stage. Digital e-signatures like DocuSign, Contract Lifecycle Management systems can be useful tools for sales people to help them close the deal with ease. Platforms like DocuSign that also integrate with your CRM or CDP will make it easier to have an more unified vision of the customer journey for the whole sales team.
Can you Create the Perfect SalesTech Stack?
Your sales tech stack has to help streamline sales rep activities, make your sales teams more effective and efficient at follow ups, and productive enough to keep driving sales.
While some of the basic sales technologies that most sales teams do feature platforms like the above, every sales leader has to keep reevaluating their sales processes and sales challenges to understand whether they need to optimize their sales tech or invest in new tools.
Some sales leaders may give more priority to people management and collaboration tools in a hybrid work environment like today, others may want to use different sales technologies like conversational AI and chatbots to drive prospect engagement. When it comes to sales tech, the choice and functionalities today are endless and what matters is the proper alignment between sales goals, sales processes and your sales tech capabilities and the whole stack!
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