The salestech market is a burgeoning ecosystem, whatever function a sales rep or sales ops personnel needs to pursue, there’s a tool for it. Be it, forecasting, direct dial systems, CRMs, CDPs, analytics – there’s a platform for everything.
But that does not signify that it’s time for sales teams to adopt all of those available sales technologies out there. What matters is, the adoption of a leaner salestech stack that can tie into other functions and goals (customer success, customer service, marketing and others) while helping teams unify their data and reports with a common business objective in mind.
Asking the right questions at the right time, to the right team members and stakeholders after analyzing where lags lie in your current sales process are crucial to achieving this.
In order to maintain a lean and mean salestech adoption process that eventually helps prove ROI and doesn’t peak costs without enabling end goals; here’s what can help –
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Identify your Core Sales Cycle and Process
What works for one brand might not work as well for another in terms of a process. A B2C brand might find a lot of success selling their products via platforms like Instagram but a B2B technology sales rep will likely have more success over email, LinkedIn and cold calls based on recent reports.
Before adopting a salestech stack, what matters is for sales teams to unify on goals and processes at the brand level.
Will the brand like to pursue emails, cold calls, LinkedIn and then direct mail as their key channels: this itself helps identify the core salestech systems that will be needed and those that will eventually need to be integrated with centralized CRMs/CDPs to align marketing-sales efforts at the corporate level.
Or, will the brand want to pursue a stronger LinkedIn, Email, Webinar, Online event cycle to pursue prospects: this then triggers the need for a different set of salestech tools.
Having a core framework in place will then allow sales teams to have the same salestech seats and tools without causing silos among sub teams.
Based on the above, a current list of your SalesTech with a list of what else is needed helps identify added costs
Freemium versions of certain salestech and martech systems can allow you to do a part of your activity, to scale all of it and keep data and reports in central systems without exceeding data storage limits, paid packages or premium packs will be needed. To keep costs under control here, ensuring you know what your core process will look like helps a team identify what salestech from the existing adoption list can help while giving a better idea on what they may potentially need to add to their tech stack down the line to help with tech budget and operational estimates.
Evaluating whether current tools can do the job to reduce added adoption of salestech where needed
Most salestech and martech systems offer integrations, plugins to keep things unified. In other cases, it is possible that existing salestech tools will actually have these ‘’hidden’’ features that can serve the purpose. Before going down the path of bagging a new salestech contract for a sales team: evaluating what is needed versus what is already part of the tech stack and then doubling down on whether existing systems have features or whether with the upgrade of the current package will allow those features to be unlocked can reduce new salestech onboarding and training costs as well.
Knowing what to measure
Adopting a variety of salestech can enable sales people but not measuring how those salestech tools enabled better sales can lead to an over adoption of technologies. After a sales cycle or process is defined and then let’s say: a team decides to drive their process with an added direct mail sending stage, knowing how much the direct mail campaign led to more sales in that month or quarter is crucial to understanding whether the process and tool (combined) enabled business goals or just drove unnecessary costs.
Trying to adopt all-in-one solutions
All in one solutions might cost more but they allow teams to have fewer tools to navigate. The secret today is not about adopting too many martech or salestech systems, but in having lean systems that drive end goals.
Tools like Apollo.io for instance, allow sales team members to find direct dials and other relevant prospect information while also giving sales reps features like email sequences automation, a VoIP to call through and even a sub domain email send facility to protect their main emails.
End Note: It’s an exciting time for salestech only if you know what to use!
To get the desired ROI from any salestech: a sales rep needs to know how to use the tool to the best of its capability. Too many salestech platforms can limit how much of each feature will be used because sales reps won’t have the time to optimize how they use all those various products.
Keeping your salestech lean and keeping it aligned to immediate sales processes and constantly re-evaluating how each of them is enabling sales people to do what they were hired to do – sell – can help businesses have a healthy salestech and sales cycle for the long term.
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