Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Business

Why Sales Teams Definitely Need a Sales Technology Stack

Today, the most successful sales teams swear by their sales technology stack. The right sales technology can augment and improve the capabilities of your sales team. But, if you don’t have the right sales technology, you could be giving away a critical advantage to the competition.

For this reason alone, you should strive to acquire the right sales technology. This will enable your sales team to thrive in the modern sales environment.

So, what does it mean when we say sales technology stack? What makes it so critical? Does the sales technology need to be complex? Can I get a single sales technology solution?

In this blog, we’ll try to understand the meaning and impact of a sales technology in your sales performance. This will also help you understand the need and implication of utilizing the right technology for your sales team.

Why your Sales Team Needs Sales Technology

A normal sales process without a sales technology goes something like this.

An internal employee is expected to sift through a large volume of leads and try to pick out a few good prospects. Then, these prospects would be persuaded hard to become paying customers.

Needless to say, this is an ineffective process to acquire actual paying customers. Without an effective way to engage the prospects, your sales team is bound to always try to sell your prospects hard.

Within this process, your sales team is required to handle a massive workload and maximize the number of acquired prospects. But this approach is unlikely to yield either high volume or margins in your sales process.

This means that you need more evolution in your sales operations. Otherwise, it should be equipped with modern sales technology stack.

So, let’s see what a sales technology is and how it can improve your sales performance.

What’s a Sales Technology Stack?

The modern-day sales process is an all-out approach to reach target prospects and turn them into paying customers.

A sales technology stack helps you simplify this process.

A sales technology stack is a combination of software tools that’ll improve the way you manage your sales process. It involves streamlining and automating the entire sales process through a single platform.

This also involves streamlining a large volume of leads, assigning them to concerned sales personnel and engaging those prospects on a long-term basis.

In turn, this will maximize your sales conversions from the point of initial leads to the final paying customers.

Now, let’s see the most useful tools within an effective sales technology stack. This would help you achieve better sales outcomes.

Lead management tool

Once your business builds a reasonable online-offline presence, you are going to receive a sizable volume of online inquiries. As it is, the sales team is expected to handle these inquiries on a one-by-one basis.

Generally, as most of the initial inquiries are junk, this isn’t an effective use of the sales people’s time.

Instead, the sales team should focus on acquiring the right leads and converting them into paying customers.

For this, a lead management software can organize and streamline your incoming leads to uncover more potential sales opportunities.

First of all, an Omni-channel integration will streamline all the generated leads to a single unified dashboard. By managing all leads within a single cloud dashboard, you will be able to pick out the best leads that fit certain parameters.

This helps you take the most proactive decision to convert each lead.

Later, you can manage all your acquired leads on a long-term timescale.

In this way, the lead management tool will significantly reduce the workload and uncover more closure opportunities for your sales team.

Focus on the right sales performance reports

A sales reporting system tied to a sales technology stack can give you much more in-depth sales reports. This goes well-beyond the reports of direct revenue/sales agent.

A normal sales process involves multiple ongoing activities.

Among these, better sales management could improve a number of these activities.

If you are a sales manager, it’s hard to track these multiple intertwined activities. You need to be able to track and optimize the different sales processes. This will improve your overall sales performance.

Without the right sales technology, the sales manager should divide his/her attention between different sales processes.

Needless to say, this is an ineffective method of managing the sales process.

A sales management system combines these different activities in a single dashboard. This allows you to generate multiple reports based on your sales operations data.

Based on these reports, the sales manager can decide which part of the sales process needs extra attention and improvement.

Sales enablement software

On top of your lead management, sales performance measurement, sales forecasting, and sales team management tools, you need a sales tool to help align department goals, onboard and train new sales members quickly, allow for routine huddles and brainstorms, and share and receive feedback to work as a hive mind and improve sales conversion and revenue.

This is where a sales enablement platform comes into play.

What is sales enablement you ask? Sales enablement is a growth-focused discipline that at it’s most fundamental helps companies grow faster by aligning their people, processes and priorities.

An integrated sales enablement platform that harnesses technology to do all mentioned above is essential to move your company into hyper growth territory. Without sales enablement, your teams and approach will be fragmented, untargeted and ultimately have each person doing their best with no real day to day guidance. By implementing a sales enablement program at your company you can have everyone goal-oriented, focused, giving and receiving consistent feedback on their efforts, and also somewhat gamify your sales teams efforts.

Mobility-based team management

As per research, the sales teams that work cohesively are much more successful than individual sales teams.

On a normal course of a day, the sales team would usually need to handle different sales activities. This makes it hard to manage the sales team as a single salesforce operation.

In this situation, the mobile CRM can become a technology-enablement tool for modern sales teams.

By having a mobile CRM platform, you can assign individual responsibilities for each sales personnel. This allows you to assign the nearest salesperson for any new opportunities. Also, you can track real-time progress and receive updates on the deal progress.

All these factors enable you to beat the competition for every prospective opportunity.

Sales forecasting application

As a sales manager, your sales force should be able to leverage all possible sales opportunities.

Simultaneously, your sales force can’t be too big for your pool of existing and near-future opportunities.

Otherwise, you would be risking your sales team to become less than optimally engaged in your sales process.

In this situation, you need to strike the balance between your sales force strength and available opportunities.

A sales forecasting system based on sales CRM data can help you achieve this objective.

By integrating your different sales processes into a single platform, you can generate reports for all the orders. This will help you predict the overall trend in your demand.

In this way, you can build your most effective sales team that’ll rake-in the most revenue.

The right sales technology stack can simplify and streamline your different sales processes. This will drive higher success in your existing sales operations. You can also integrate multiple APIs to add more functionalities within your sales technology stack.

Written By

I am expert in marketing and business strategy. I create content to inspire and educate entrepreneurs in developing startup markets.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Erika Ann

    July 5, 2018 at 6:32 am

    With the many technologies, applications, and programs that are available for the sales industry today, looking for the perfect technology stack is just a matter of mix and match for businesses. I like your points on this talking about lead management software and CRMs. With the current sales industry being more customer-centric, sales need to keep up through these technologies to organize leads and easily analyze data through sales forecast programs.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

You May Also Like

Business

In the world of B2B commerce, the triumph of your enterprise largely hinges on the productivity and efficiency of your sales team. The higher...

Small Business

Businesses worldwide follow certain metrics to keep track of their growth. One of the most effective ways to measure your company’s growth is to consider...

Business

A strong and effective sales deck is a necessary tool for any high-impact salesperson. But creating a deck that stands out from the rest...

Business

Before any of the newer technologies and methods were discovered, the means to increase sales pipeline was through the phone. The salesperson was required...