Making sense of the ever evolving salestech landscape is in itself a big challenge.
But for most organizations who already boast of a sophisticated martech and salestech stack, ensuring that they are using the right technologies to optimize the right processes is the key to driving value and achieving end goals.
Given that the salestech and even martech landscape today boasts of far too many tools (and therefore options) it is easy for smaller teams who are new to this changing landscape to feel a little lost.
Read More: Six SalesTech Tools That Can Help Reduce Friction Between Marketing And Sales
The best way to ensure that any marketing and sales team has got what they need from this endless list of choices begins with identifying the right business challenges and correlating it to the right technologies followed by a ground up implementation of the right processes and tools.
Here’s what can help you extract better value out of your salestech and overall sales process
Are your Sales tools enabling better Marketing-Sales Alignment?
In several ways, marketing buys or processes are closely tied to sales. Sales enablement tools and technologies can therefore help create that better alignment between these two teams while ensuring that both sides optimize their communication, followups and processes to achieve the right end-result – a closed deal.
While many do argue that a typical martech stack should not be separated from a salestech stack – the reality is that each team has to define where one’s responsibilities ends and the other’s begins. This helps identify which tools should overlap between both the sides and which tools should be specific to one.
Need more tips from the experts on reducing friction between marketing and sales? This podcast episode will help:
Do you have a unified vision of the status of your prospects and leads?
One of the biggest reasons for Marketing and Sales teams to experience friction in their day to day activities is when both sides don’t have a unified understanding of every prospect or lead’s buying cycle or buying journey. This is when it becomes all the more crucial to integrate or implement a system and martech/salestech stack that can allow deeper visibility into the leads marketing is currently running campaigns for while sales gets to understand the behavior of those leads.
This allows CSOs access to the right data to help implement or strengthen sales strategies based on the prospects/leads actual buying stage and behavior thereby hitting on the right buying triggers at the right time.
Predictive scoring tools, Account targeting platforms can provide some element of visibility to both teams here, a balanced CRM and CDP also enables a more unified vision ensuring that the whole organization is on the same page vis-à-vis the status of their leads.
Need more tips on using your Customer Data Platform more Effectively to Drive Sales? This podcast episode where David Raab addresses these issues will help:
Engaging with prospects at the right time will ensure better optimization and utilization of resources and efforts while helping to shorten (the usually long) B2B and technology sales cycle. The fundamental need for any salesperson is to know whom to sell to and why. Deeper visibility on the status of prospects matters most.
Does your Salestech stack help enable better Sales conversations?
Half of a technology salesperson’s battle is won when they can portray the top benefits of their product to a prospect and generate interest, within a short span of time. The right product demo tool is one way of ensuring this, another is ensuring that Sales has the right outreach process and sales technologies in place to help start and run multiple conversations effectively with prospects. Proper integration between marketing and sales and understanding of what email marketing tools are in use, what is the cadence that should be put in place based on the buyer’s journey and level of interest are all fundamentals that come into play at this stage.
The right alignment at this level can help ensure that both teams are utilizing time, resources and efforts to drive sales conversations and closures that already have a higher potential win rate.
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Marketing Automation-Sales Automation
Automation helps marketing and sales automate the most mundane and repetitive tasks. The right automation is another way of improving the overall performance of sales and marketing. Why have someone manually send hundreds of emails when you can have a tool do it for you? However, at this stage it is crucial to know when to step in and extract prospects and leads from a typical automated sales cadence, identifying the right triggers (by assessing the unified data available in the central CRM or CDP) is integral to this part of the process. You can take full advantage of your sales technology and focus on highly personalized messaging once you extract the most qualified leads from an automated cadence.
The sales process is long in tech and B2B, optimizing certain parts of the process can help shorten the cycle. These are some starting points that can help.