Does Your Tech Stack Up?

Your sales and marketing tech stack should mirror your sales process and make things simpler for your team, not harder. When adding apps or tools to your sales tech stack it should help the salespeople be more efficient and not just so you can see “What’s going on.”

The Basics

At a minimum, you should have a CRM system that allows the team to work leads in the funnel, deals in progress, track communications (email, phone calls, and other touches), and a sales pipeline that lines up with your sales process. There is no shortage of options and add ons. Our own Marisa Fallone wrote a piece on CRM do’s and don’ts, be sure to check it out. Before adding any integrations or apps to your CRM make sure it is to reduce steps in the process, not add them. You’ll want dashboards for tracking KPIs, so you know where to coach and have more accurate forecasts. Making sure you have the right KPIs will let you know where you need to focus your attention and with whom.

Lead Generation

In B2B sales both marketing and sales need to proactively generate leads, and list building is a must. Assuming you know the profile and personas of your ideal customers you can identify your TAM (total acquirable market). The real trick however is getting the information you need to make contact! You’ll need company names, contact names, email addresses and phone numbers. Two of the best tools out there currently are ZoomInfo.com and Seamless.AI.

Pre-Call Prep

Whether you are calling on a prospect for the first time or reaching out to an inbound lead you should always have a clear purpose to your call, and something to say. The best way to prep for this is by doing your homework before each call. Asking yourself, internally, “What is the purpose of my call? What do I know? What do I need to know? And What do I need them to share?” One of the best tools for doing research and keeping in the know about your prospects is LinkedIn and its sister software, Sales Navigator. These two tools, combined with the right CRM and marketing engine is a formidable combination!

Coaching Tools

A sales leader’s job is not to grow sales. It’s to grow salespeople, and you can’t coach to what you cannot hear or see. There is so much technology available for communicating with prospects and customers it numbs the mind. As an added benefit this same technology allows us to be more effective and efficient. It also allows you, as a sales leader, to review how your salespeople are representing you in the market. This can provide multiple coaching and training opportunities. The only thing more effective than your feedback after listening to recorded calls is having your salespeople listen to their calls after the fact, together with you. We are all typically our own biggest critics. Two great examples are Chorus.ai and Otter.ai.

Tying it all together

The most difficult part of getting your sales tech stack right is picking the right tools for the right jobs, and not creating duplication of work. In a perfect world, all of the tools integrate with one another and don’t require multiple steps, duplication of effort, or multiple logins. 

For a list of the most current and innovative apps and sales tech email us at Les@LesLent.com and put ‘Tech’ in the subject line.