Tech Stack Priorities: For All Business Stages
As you grow your business and ultimately your tech stack, what should be your priorities, and on what kind of timeline?
No matter where you are in your business journey, your sales tech stack is always in need of inspection to ensure that you are efficiently utilizing your tools and justifying your investment.
Balancing your costs while empowering your reps to be successful is a delicate but necessary move. However, before we go any further: What is a Sales Tech Stack?
A sales tech stack is the tools and technologies in place for reps to be as successful as possible.
Each sales team is constructed to be as efficient as possible to generate as much profit as possible. Unfortunately, we can’t make the day longer. However, we can find ways to give time back to our reps. Whether that be through automating administrative tasks, confirming education of new products, or reducing dial time, we have the solution for all business stages.
Must Haves:
These are the tools that are imperative for even the earliest or most basic of sales organizations.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – This tool is vital to every sales organization and should be your “source of truth” for all your prospects and customers. Your CRM should have the minimum capability to track and provide data on your entire marketing & sales cycle from initial contact, nurture, qualify, demonstration, close, and current customer lifecycle.
- HubSpot
- Zoho One
- Salesforce
- Pipedrive
- SugarCRM
- Monday.com
- Data Intelligence Solutions – Once your CRM is in place and can track your prospects and customers through the entire sales cycle, it is time to build out your whitespace report. To do that, you need to know your Ideal Customer Profile. Once that is understood, you can use one of these tools for your reps to work manually, use the tools exporting abilities, or use an automation vendor such as WRK, to provide a whitespace report for your company.
- Zoominfo
- Sales Navigator / LinkedIn
- Dun & Bradstreet
- Voila Norbert
- Hunter
- Prospect.io
- Clearbit
- Video Conferencing / Sales Demo Tool – With the heavy disruption of in-person business meetings over the past years, you need a tool that enables sales reps to virtually meet with prospects and customers and forge deeper connections. While you can also use this tool for internal meetings, it is important to equip your sales team for external meetings.
- Zoom
- GoToMeeting
- Microsoft Teams
- DemoBuilder
- Walnut.io
Will Save Reps Valuable Time:
While your sales reps can do their job without these tools, effective use will save valuable time and help your reps become more efficient. In sales, time is money. Give your sales reps more time and they will show a return with more revenue.
- Sales Execution and Engagement – Have the ability to automate and manage emails, and record calls, all within the same platform. These tools are built to seamlessly move reps between activities while maximizing the amount of information available to them. While these tools have varying capabilities, optimized implementation enables reps to be more successful.
- Outreach
- Groove
- Yesware
- HubSpot
- Reply.io
- SalesLoft
- Calendaring – Calendaring software removes a point of friction from the sales process and eliminates the back and forth of calendaring events. Additionally, if you are leading with product lead growth, you can use this tool to schedule meetings with prospects starting from your landing page or form fills.
- Calendly
- Chili Piper
- Doodle
- HubSpot
- Customer Success Tools – The most challenging part is moving the customer through the sales process, but once accomplished, the most important business objection begins: growing the relationship. Implement tools that are designed to reduce customer churn by enhancing visibility and providing your team with the data needed to view the entire customer lifecycle.
- Churnzero
- Gainsight
- Planhat
- E-Signature – In today’s selling environment, it is important to have reps equipped with tools to reduce friction at the end of the sales process. Having an e-signature tool to make the last step simple but still provide visibility helps all parties involved breathe a little easier during the final stage.
- DocuSign
- PandaDoc
- eSignatures.io
- HelloSign
Nice To Haves:
Once your tech stack is built out and processes are defined to keep it running smoothly, these tools are the finishing touch to your tech stack.
- Auto-Dialers – These are unique tools that have the capacity to serve reps differently. Whether using it to reduce time dialing or to dial multiple numbers at once until connected to a live contact, these tools can be enormous time savers for reps who prospect over the phone.
- ConnectandSell
- Orum
- MonsterConnect
- PhoneBurner
- RPA Software – When sales reps are burdened with too many administrative tasks and paperwork, it is time to look at RPA software for the sales team. These tools help automate repetitive/administrative tasks and put the minutes that add up to hours back into your sales reps’ calendars.
- Wrk
- Automation Anywhere
- UiPath
- Blue Prism
- Robocorp
- Appian
- Pega
Prepare your team to hit their Q4 Goal
Balancing the business cost and enabling your sales team with the tools to not leave revenue on the table is a tightrope process that requires consistent inspection. Areas to inspect should include an examination of tool implementation, tool adoption, and the time savings across the team. When properly implemented and adopted in an organization, these tools will result in a more efficient and effective sales team.
