What are Sales Technologies?

Sales technologies encompass a range of tools and software that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of sales teams. They streamline various aspects of the sales process, from lead generation and customer relationship management to sales analytics and automation.

With sales tech, you can:

• Automate tasks
• Organize and store customer information
• Schedule and run meetings
• Track your sales pipeline
• Analyze data
• Collect customer feedback

Digital sales tools create the interface connecting your customers and salespeople. Without them, there’s a huge gap between what you know, what you can do, and what your customers want from you.

Synonyms

• Digital sales tools
• Sales software
• Sales rep tools
• Sales tech
• Sales technology stack

Benefits of Sales Technology

According to data from Freshworks, 94% of tech companies and 71% of small businesses use CRM. And businesses using a CRM are 86% more likely to exceed their sales goals. Other sales technology, like sales analytics and automation tools, further contribute to your team’s bottom-line success by making your processes more efficient and providing data-driven insights.

Let’s take a look at precisely why you need to invest in sales tools:

Sales process facilitation

First and foremost, we have to point out that in this day and age, you can’t run a sales operation at all without software!

For the modern sales team, the future is remote-first. According to research from Prezentor, 4 out of every 5 B2B sales take place virtually. If you don’t have cloud-based software, you simply won’t be able to reach your customers. And even if you can, you won’t be able to give them the level of convenience and flexibility they expect from modern businesses.

Sales tools provide a seamless, efficient process for your sales team to manage leads, communicate with customers, and track progress, all of which you’ll need throughout the inside sales process.

Efficient sales operations

Beyond the fact that you need sales technologies, implementing the right ones can optimize and streamline your operations as well. Manual tasks are one of the main problems sales reps face — a few minutes of admin work here, then the extra time for follow-ups and emails there, all adds up. Salesforce found reps spend just 28% of their week actually selling.

With sales tech, you can:

• Eliminate repetitive tasks like data entry and lead routing
• Centralize customer communication and information
• Track and analyze performance metrics in real-time

All of this helps your team shorten the sales cycle while eliminating friction at every touchpoint.

Repeatable sales processes and scalability

Modern sales technology tools are built to be scalable — that is, they can handle higher volumes of leads, deals, and customers without compromising on speed or quality. This means you can scale your sales operations process and expand your business without worrying about outgrowing your tools.

With software, you can also create standardized workflows using a sales playbook, making it easier for new reps to jump in and start selling quickly. Through this, plus collaboration tools, you can develop a repeatable sales process that can be easily scaled and replicated across your sales team.

A more productive sales team

McKinsey says that sales automation can free up ~20% of your sales team’s capacity. With a whole extra day added to their week, they will:

• Manage their time better
• Spend more time on revenue-driving activities like outbound sales
• Worry less about errors, forgetting to follow up with a lead, etc.
• Focus on high-value leads with a high probability of closing
• Hit quota more often
• Be less stressed and burned out

Since leadership has access to performance and activity data, they’ll also get better coaching from their managers and will receive more support from the whole team as a result.

Personalization at scale

It’s pretty well-known businesses need to personalize their engagements to succeed. Nearly three-quarters of B2B customers say they prefer a “fully/mostly personalized” buying experience.

Plus, delivering one can actually increase the amount they spend on and advocate for your products and services — 77% of people have picked, recommended, and/or paid more for a brand that can offer this.

Sales automation makes personalization scalable by gathering data and automating tasks like lead scoring, follow-ups, engagement tracking, and more. Some tools can even account for your customers’ content consumption patterns and, for SaaS companies, product usage trends so sales teams get a better context for a fully personalized customer experience.

Data-driven decision-making

CRM, CPQ, and analytics tools have a wealth of insights different members of your sales organization will use in their own way.

• Individual reps and AEs can look at their own performance metrics and see how they stack up against their quota, what the value of their current pipeline is, and what activities they need to do more or less of to achieve their goals.
• Department managers can take a higher-level view and analyze composite data from all sales reps, as well as look at individual performance and offer tailored coaching for each team member.
• Executives use sales performance and revenue metrics as the baseline for their decisions about resource allocation, expansion, investments, and high-level strategies. They use it to develop forecasts and projections, plan budgets, and track the company’s progress toward its goals.
• Marketing teams also rely on sales data. It helps them improve targeting, messaging, and positioning, so they can fill the pipeline with qualified leads.
• Customer success managers use sales insights to understand customers’ needs, expectations, and behaviors. It helps them develop strategies for retaining customers and upselling them.

Types of Sales Technologies

Every sales tech stack involves multiple tools, but they generally fall into several broad categories:

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

CRM software is the hub of your sales stack. It’s where all your customer data is stored and managed.

It can:

• Track every customer interaction and activity across all channels (e.g., email, phone calls, meetings, and social media)
• Store and organize customer data (e.g., contact information, purchase history, notes, preferences)
• Automate sales tasks, like emails, scheduling, reminders, and follow-ups
• Manage leads and opportunities, sometimes with lead scoring capabilities
• Generate reports and sales dashboards to help you track performance metrics and make informed decisions

Your marketing and customer success teams also use CRM. So, it also serves to align your sales department with the rest of your organization and break down data silos between other revenue-generating teams.

Sales enablement tools

Sales enablement is the process of giving your sales team the tools and information they need to sell more effectively. Sales enablement tools allow them to do just that.

Examples of sales enablement software include:

• Learning management systems (LMS) for training, coaching, and onboarding new reps
• Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software for building quotes and proposals, running sales playbooks, and automating approvals
• Sales engagement platforms for managing email campaigns, calls, meetings, and other interactions with prospects and customers
• Content management systems (CMS) for organizing and distributing sales collateral, like presentations, case studies, videos, and articles.
• Digital sales rooms for sharing and negotiating contracts and agreements
• Meeting recording, notetaking, and transcription tools for capturing and sharing important information from sales conversations
• Integrations and plugins to connect your CRM with other tools and systems

There are also plenty of AI-powered sales enablement tools, like McKinsey Periscope’s Dynamic Deal Scoring.

Sales intelligence tools

Sales intelligence tools help sales reps gather and analyze data about their prospects, customers, and competitors. They use this information to inform and improve their sales strategy.

You can use sales intelligence tools for:

• Lead generation
• Account-based selling
• Competitive intelligence
• Market analysis and segmentation
• Buyer intent and behavior tracking

Some popular sales intelligence tools include ZoomInfo, InsideView, DiscoverOrg, and Gong. As an example, DealHub’s integration with Gong allows you to look at buyer intent information for each deal in your pipeline, helping you prioritize deals and personalize your sales approach with next-best actions.

Sales communication tools

Communication is a crucial part of the sales process. That’s why there are many tools available to help sales reps communicate effectively with prospects and customers, including:

• Email tracking and analytics to measure engagement and improve messaging
• Sales dialers, which allow you to make multiple calls at once and automate voicemail drops
• Video conferencing for virtual meetings and presentations
• Live chat for real-time conversations on your website or through messaging apps
• Chatbots to perform simple lead qualification and routing and initiate basic conversations with prospects
• Social selling tools like Sales Navigator to find and engage with prospects

You also have tools for internal communication, like Slack or Microsoft Teams. You need these to share information, collaborate, and stay organized as a team.

Importance of Integrating Your Sales Tech Stack

Maybe you’ve automated aspects of your sales process already. But if your tools don’t integrate with each other, you’re actually creating more problems than you’re solving.

Now, your data is scattered across different platforms. Your reps have to spend time manually entering data. And your processes are still disjointed, so you haven’t streamlined the whole process.

You need tools that play nice together. Period.

Seamless workflows

The first reason you want integration is because that’s the only way you’ll be able to transition from one process to the next without friction.

Let’s say a lead heads to your website, reads your home page, and books a call. They enter their contact details, share which products they’re looking for, and enter basic details about their business. Without CRM integration, your salespeople might never see this.

By integrating your CRM with your web tools, you can capture each lead and auto-populate it into your CRM in seconds. It’ll even route the lead to the right rep to handle the call. And all of this happens without manual input.

Accurate data and reporting

Integration eliminates silos between different types of data, like interactions with your marketing content, responses to your sales outreach, and items selected on a quote. Without it, you have no true way of knowing which of your sales and marketing efforts are driving actual sales.

When your tools work together, you also have consistency in your data. You don’t have to worry about discrepancies or duplicate entries, as the integration will automatically update information across all your platforms. You can trust your sales reporting and forecasting to be accurate.

Better collaboration

Sales tools facilitate real-time communication between team members, which means you can share updates, give feedback, work deals together, and strategize regardless of where you and your sales reps are located.

You also have shared access to information (with access controls), making it easier to collaborate on deals. For instance, a digital sales room like DealRoom lets your reps and prospects share documents and negotiate a deal together, in real-time, through a microsite. And Slack integration lets managers approve deals without leaving the app.

Data-driven insights

The data you get from sales technologies is a stepping stone to actionable business intelligence.

For example:

• CPQ tells you which products are selling better than others, which helps you tweak your pricing strategy and focus on your top-performing products.
• CRM tells you everything — which leads are most likely to convert, each rep’s pipeline coverage, your conversion rate, how much revenue you’ve generated, average deal size, and dozens of other metrics.
• Marketing automation reveals how leads interact with your content and campaigns, which channels are most effective, and how much ROI you’re getting from your marketing efforts.

Then you have sales analytics platforms that specifically focus on making sense of sales metrics and performance. And you have tools like call recorders that help you review, evaluate, and improve upon customer interactions.

Sales Technology Implementation Guide

You have a lot of considerations when it comes to building your tech stack. All your sales technologies have to integrate with each other. They have to fit your team’s needs and day-to-day processes. And they have to give you the insights and automation capabilities you need to grow your revenue and scale your sales.

1. Identify your needs.

Different types of sales processes will necessitate different tools. You’ll want to think about the level of complexity in your sales cycle and everything you need to understand about your leads, prospects, and customers.

Generally, the larger your company is, the more advanced features you’ll need. But you’ll also need to think about the type of business you’re running — if you’re a B2B SaaS company, you’ll need software that can handle the nuances of subscription sales and SaaS metrics, but a contract manufacturer would need visual configuration capabilities.

Chances are, you’re not starting from zero. You probably already use some sort of CRM software and associated tools to capture leads, manage deals, and measure performance. So you’ll have to determine your pain points with your current processes, then find software that fills the gaps.

2. Consider your budget and resources.

You should have a realistic expectation of what you are willing to spend and what resources you have available to devote to implementation and maintenance. You’ll need to balance the cost of the software with its potential return on investment.

When evaluating the price of different tools, you should pay attention to the different layers of costs, such as setup fees, subscription plans, per-user pricing, and add-on features. You should estimate your future increases in usage and headcount ahead of time — the cheapest option at your current team size might become expensive once you scale your usage if per-user rates don’t come down.

3. Evaluate different tools and their features.

Since you already know what your pain points are and what you need the tool to do now and in the future, you can boil it down to a few key features that you’ll need to evaluate in each tool.

• Core business functions (e.g., for a SaaS company vs. a manufacturer)
• User experience
• Ease of integration with your other core sales tools
• Customization and scalability options
• Reporting and analytics features

It helps to involve your team members in the selection process from the very beginning. They’re the end users, so they should have a huge say in which system you choose. Software adoption is a huge determining factor in whether you see the ROI from a specific tool, so don’t overlook this step.

4. Develop a comprehensive implementation plan.

Once you’ve found the tool that best suits your needs, you have to lay the groundwork for a smooth transition from your existing system. The first thing you’ll do is create a timeline with key milestones and deadlines for each stage of the process.

Then, you’ll outline the roles and responsibilities for each member of your implementation team. Usually, the leader of sales technology implementation is the sales operations manager or director.

You can also start planning for training and support. At the enterprise level, this might include one-to-one training sessions and vendor-provided materials, while for smaller businesses can normally get away with group training sessions and online resources.

From there, all you need to worry about is the setup. Some tools, like CPQ and CRM, take a lot longer to set up because you have to enter in lots of data and set up rules, access permissions, etc., before you can start using it.

One thing to keep in mind is that implementation will likely take longer than you originally anticipate, so be sure to factor in some buffer time for unexpected delays or issues.

5. Integrate with your other systems.

This can either take a very long time, or it can be done quickly. It all depends on the amount of data you have to connect and the overall complexity.

Large systems like CPQ and CRM will take longer to integrate because they often need to connect with multiple other systems and databases. But connecting to a communication tool like Slack, for example, is as simple as pasting in an API key.

For the systems that will take longer to integrate, you’ll need to plan ahead to minimize disruption to your sales workflow. You might need to temporarily shut down certain systems or schedule downtime during off-peak hours.

6. Monitor and optimize your sales process.

Once you have everything configured, you’re all set to start using your new sales technologies. And that means you’ll have plenty of new data coming in.

• Sales performance metrics
• Customer data
• Lead and opportunity tracking
• Email and communication analytics

You should also look at how your team engages with the software and what kind of difference it’s making. You can find sales productivity metrics in your systems, but you should also ask your team members directly what they think of the software.

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