How to Build Your Sales Tech Stack

#TechTuesday

Have a look at the chart below: 

It represents the tech landscape of sales tools available - a plethora of software applications designed to make your professional life easier and more efficient. So, if I download all of these to my phone I should easily have a 4-minute work week, right? Hopefully you understand I’m joking as we both know it doesn’t work that way. What we’re really looking at is a massive volume of tools and the unenviable task of having to choose what will best serve us and our clients. 

If you take a closer look at the chart you’ll see that it’s broken down and organized based on 5 main categories: Engagement, Productivity & Enablement, Sales Intelligence, Pipeline & Analytics, and People Management. Each section is further broken down into several sub-categories to help identify tools that can fit a specific need which helps to narrow down the list, but that still leaves several apps in each sub-category to choose from. How do you narrow it down to the best choice from there? 

I can’t tell you what to use as there are almost as many variables involved in choosing as there are applications. What I can do is help you to focus on the types of tools you should prioritize. 

The typical sales stack for a company consists of the following:

• A CRM Platform

• A Social Prospecting Tool

• A Presentation/Video Tool 

• A Pipeline Management Tool

• A Data/List/Marketing Automation Tool

• An Email Management Tool

Not a bad list, but it isn’t exactly narrowing down our decision. Instead of looking at pure functionality, let’s flip this around and look at what we want to accomplish. In fact, Sales Hacker has done an excellent job of identifying the key activities for which you should build around. Here they are:

Intelligence: Sales intelligence refers to technologies, applications, and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of information to help salespeople find, monitor and understand data that provides insights into prospects’ and existing clients’ daily business. (Wikipedia)

Enablement: Sales Enablement is centered around getting the right people in the right conversations with the right decision-makers in the right way. You can break the complexity of sales enablement into practical ideas through scalable and repeatable practices that will lead to increased revenue. (Roderick Jefferson)

Engagement: Called “the next communication revolution,” sales engagement combines the best capabilities of human sellers and artificial intelligence, making it easier and faster for businesses to reach customers at the right moment, on the right channel, and to engage them with the right message. As a result, it makes it possible to humanize sales at scale. (Sales Engagement, by Manny Medina, Max Altschuler, and Mark Kosoglow)

Pipeline, Analytics, Measurement: This is all about optimization. And the rule of thumb in optimization is this: If you don’t measure it, it didn’t happen. As prospects move from awareness to consideration to decision, it’s critical that you track the sales metrics that matter most.

Management, Coaching: Sales management is the development of a sales force, coordinating sales operations, and sales techniques that help a business consistently meet and beat its sales targets. Coaching (including pipeline reviews and role play exercises) helps sales reps do their part.

You can now use these 5 operations as a filter against the available technology on the market and look for tools that could provide more than one of these in their offering thus saving you money in the process. 

Push yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you.