What are the best sales technology and sales tools in 2019 that you could add to your tech stack?
In this Part 1 article of the series, we would focus on ten high-octane sales technology options that have proved their value in accelerating the sales process and help sales teams close more deals. These sales technologies are evaluated for their impact on sales velocity, lead generation, lead prospecting, and personalization in customer success. Overall, adding these sales techs in any sales process could significantly shorten the Sales cycle, and improve success rates.
Sales CRM and Contact Management
Businesses work on contacts and sales prospects. CRM and basic contact management tools deliver quick and easily scalable results. A robust database runs the engine for any CRM used for marketing and sales alignments. Getting your contact information is absolutely vital in finding who your right customers are, and how you intend to build your messaging strategy for these customers.
What Sales CRM does?
Any Sales CRM should be able to centralize data management and contact information to maintain and scale a healthy sales funnel. It leads to contacts mapped to their organizations based on their roles and locations (and other metric depending on the CRM filters).
Modern sales CRM tools are highly intuitive and run on predictive intelligence algorithms for users to create agile customer-focused lead management.
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A Sales CRM in 2019 should be able to do these activities for you –
- Sales Pipeline/ Account Management
- Lead Tracking and Lead Management
- Email Tracking and Smart Contact Management
- Sales Funnel Optimization
- Sales Reporting
- Sales Team Collaboration
- Salesforce Tracking
- Mobile Sales CRM
Salestech Choices in Sales CRM for 2019
- Salesforce CRM
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales
- LeadSquared
- Pipedrive
- Infor Sales
- HubSpot
- ClinchPad
- PipelineDeals
- Nimble
- Yesware
Contract Management and E-signature Automation Technology
In sales tech landscape, Contract Management and e-document generation tools have taken a major leap in recent times. A lot of sales deals were lost to manual challenges in managing the bottlenecks in contract documentation. Salestech users who leverage contract management are fast-tracking their sales deals, attaining 39% higher sales quota compared to non-users. It also shortened the sales cycle by 24% with a return 20% higher conversion rate on leads.
Salestech choices for automated contract management for 2019
- Conga
- Salesforce CPQ
- Icertis
- Apttus
- SAP Ariba
- ContractWorks
- Smart by GEP
- Contract Insight Contract Management
- PandaDoc
- Trackado
- DealHub.io
Sales Call Management and Analytics
Leading sales technology users recommend using call analytics and call management tools to track caller demographics and their marketing attributes accurately. Modern sales call analytics technologies and tools are laced with predictive intelligence software to analyze the nature of inbound traffic linked to CRMs and deliver real-time reporting based on keyword search and sales-specific filters.
Top choices in call analytics for sales would make any sales funnel more accurate, providing an accelerated life cycle in closing deals with better account targeting and enablement.
Salestech choices for Call Analytics
Sales Performance Analytics and Gamification
Sales is a high-octane activity and it’s natural for professionals to feel burnt out and demotivated. There could be many hindering factors that could lead a sales team to lose focus and miss targets – the biggest of these is clearly the disharmony between sales processes and the individuals handling those. Adding sales enablement and gamification tools into sales could significantly impact sales performance and intrinsically inspire sales reps to drive sales success at a sustained rate. Sales enablement and sales gamification technologies are certain to make a big boost to 2019 sales scorecards.
Salestech choices for sales performance and gamification
- MindTickle
- Highspot
- Brainshark
- Gamifyd
- Splash
- Membrain
- LevelEleven
- com
- CallidusCloud MySalesGame
- OneUp Sales
- Seismic
Sales Conference and Webinars
A recent spur of events and conferences in the sales technology ecosystem has led to a massive rise in the number of event automation tools and technologies for these companies.
In 2019, sales webinar and live event management are expected to further amplify marketing and sales reach with higher potential to meet lead gen targets. For a better, personalized sales networking, B2B marketing and sales teams are engaging their customers, channel partners and technology integration experts to speak more on their best offering and what makes them a credible force in the sales tech industry.
Salestech choices for Webinars and sales conferenence management
- ON24
- GoToWebinar
- Cisco WebEx
- GetResponse
- Zoom
- BrightTALK
- BlueJeans
- Livestorm
- WebinarJam
The other five in this list that we would review in Part 2 of the series would be:
- Sales Email Automation
- Sales video engagement
- ABM and Sales Intelligence
- PR Tech and Media Intelligence
The right sales technology tool in 2019 would depend on your specific needs and budget, of course. However, as we see Predictive Intelligence and AI-driven technologies proliferating into the sales tech industry, the above-mentioned tools could be best considered as ubiquitous and must-haves as you build your sales game for the year ahead.