Over the last decade, sales leaders have witnessed drastic evolutions in sales tech. In the past, sales tech meant a combination of CRMs and Excel sheets, along with cold calling / email marketing cadences. Today, sales technologies offer different capabilities to help simplify multiple areas of sales and to automate important tasks like emails, outreach, data collection, closing deal cycles and more.
Access to data is not a problem in today’s data-driven environment. Enabling teams with the right tools to help them streamline their pipelines and the sales journey amid a wide array of sales technologies is. Onboarding a tool but not building a sales team’s capabilities when it comes to using that tool optimally doesn’t help achieve goals, for instance. Adopting tools that create overlaps in functionality is another common issue that organizations face.
To help avoid this and map out a sales process that in turn helps visualize the required sales tech stack to enable that process is a first step towards choosing the best-fit products.
A Common Sales tech stack typically includes:
CRM Platform (Salesforce, etc)
Video Conferencing / Calling / Meeting Tool (Zoom, etc)
Marketing Automation (Pardot, etc)
Prospecting Tools (Lead IQ, ZoomInfo, etc)
Sales Engagement Software: (SalesLoft, etc)
Price Quoting Software: (DealHub, etc)
Here are a few questions and tips that can help make a better choice:
What do you need, to automate outreach and further engage the top of the funnel?
Any new sales engagement software should be able to give the required ROI. Choosing tools that can help automate sales tasks to allow sales teams to engage more prospects within a shorter time frame will enable more results from top of the funnel. Automating daily sales tasks, scheduling outreach, auto-generating emails and having all of this integrated into a central system will seamlessly allow multiple team members to have a better overview of the organization-wide pipeline and real-time data on how prospects are moving through the funnel or interacting with the company.
Quick Tips To Help You Choose:
- Tools with multiple integrations and clean interfaces that can fit a growing need (for expanding teams)
- Onboard Platforms that can integrate well with existing systems
- Tools that help streamline customized campaigns for multiple ICPs and Personas are useful
Read More: SalesTechStar Interview With Todd Heger, Chief Revenue Officer At Digilant
What increases a sales reps efficiency?
The right prospecting tool makes life easier for anyone in sales. Helping your sales team reduce time spent on tasks like looking for contact information, for instance, will enable reps to use that time to refocus on tasks that lead to direct ROI. To use salestech to scale a sales process, it is important to give salespeople more time to work with. Using technologies like LeadIQ or ZoomInfo can help here.
Quick Tip To Help You Choose:
- From an efficiency standpoint, first understanding where your team needs to save time on processes that do not connect to direct (or quick) results is what can enable a smarter choice.
How can you automate the end of the funnel tasks?
Moving a prospect through the buying stages is half the battle won. Closing the deal and ensuring the last stages of the sales cycle are smooth and not time consuming is also an enabler in sales. It takes sales people a fair amount of time to put together a contract proposal quote. A sales rep will then have to negotiate terms with the customer, make edits to the document and go through a few more rounds of communication before everything is finalized. Reducing the time spent on this back and forth with the right contract automation tools can save sales reps a lot of time.
Quick Tips To Help You Choose:
- Choose a tool that allows sales reps to easily negotiate deals and make changes to contracts
- Pick tools that prioritize readability and offer seamless e-signature capabilities
- Adopt Tools that integrate directly into the existing CRM
