What’s in a Sales Tech Stack?
Becca Eddleman
The sophistication and integration of tech on multiple levels within the sales org is reflective of the increased competition for leads and demonstrable productivity and ROI.
The most successful sales leaders and teams have incorporated sales technology into every step of their process to make them more productive and eliminate tedious and administrative tasks that keep their sellers from selling and leadership focused on results and strategy.
Developing a dynamic sales tech stack is crucial to a productive sales process.
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But, what is a sales tech stack?
Your core sales tech stack should include tools that create and promote organization, cut out redundancies, and integrate automation into the sales process, allowing you to cover more ground effectively.
Rather than foundering in a sea of unorganized, not-followed-up-with leads and broken processes, a solid tech stack supports automation and organization so your team can focus on qualified leads and tasks that generate real revenue.
While each company will build its sales tech stack slightly differently, there are certain tools no sales team can do without, especially when they grow to a certain team and revenue size.
This article will cover the main tools you’ll find in every core tech stack and a few of the top players for each category.
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- CRM
- Data Enrichment
- Sales Engagement
- Conversational Intelligence
- Scheduling
- CMS
- Guided Adoption
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Building Your Core Tech Stack from Series A to IPO
What’s in a Sales Tech Stack?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Your CRM is your single source of truth for all lead, contact, opportunity, etc., information.
Many sales teams forget that a CRM isn’t just for logging contact information or opportunity dollar amounts. A CRM’s original purpose was to manage every customer and potential customer interaction. The “relationship management” is in the name.
With detailed notes and profiles, your CRM software should ensure you aren’t asking the same questions from the same prospects repeatedly. And if you have handoffs or multiple handoffs in your process, the notes and details assure the next person can pick up where the last left off without forcing prospects to start from square one in every interaction.
Here are a few of the top CRMs for sales teams.
Salesforce
Promising to connect the entire company on a single platform, Salesforce integrates with existing data and systems.
Hubspot
Moving far beyond contact management, Hubspot offers a real-time, detail-infused dashboard that is scalable to your team size.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive offers a real estate CRM+ model that manages, automates, tracks lead interaction, and delivers detailed analytics.
Data Enrichment
Incomplete data can make lead follow-up challenging. You can collect customer data from apps and form tools that are missing essential information. Data enrichment tools help you fill in the gaps by crawling particular websites for that crucial data.
Rather than reps wasting your time scouring the internet or writing off a potential lead because of missing information, you can ensure you’re spending time reaching out to leads that are getting the message.
Data Enrichment tools can save reps hours in research time.
Slintel
Slintel is one of the best go-to-market intelligent solutions with comprehensive lead enrichment, buyer intent, and technographic information.
ZoomInfo
An extensive database is good, but a healthy and robust database is better. ZoomInfo focuses on clean and consistent data throughout your stack.
Clearbit
Touting the most reliable dataset, Clearbit ranks highly and delivers data enrichment in real-time.
Sales Engagement
We don’t know how it’s possible to live in this digital selling age with multiple touchpoints and not use a sales engagement tool.
Tracking and analyzing each buyer interaction helps teams refine their messaging, iterate faster, and look for more efficient ways to prospect by focusing on valuable touchpoints and reducing ineffective interactions.
Analyzing these touchpoints also provides opportunities to replicate the sequences of your top-performing reps and redirect campaigns that aren’t landing.
Outreach
Outreach is one of the #1 sales engagement tools on the market (along with Salesloft). Consolidate outbound tools with integrations and never miss sending an email, call, message, or other touchpoints.
Salesloft
Salesloft syncs sales engagement to your CRM and moves everything from calls to meetings to a central dashboard so you can track your quotas and avoid dead-end work.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LSN should almost be its own category as it integrates with other Sales Engagement tools and is a social networking platform. Personalize your outbound while also moving into extended networks with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Conversational Intelligence
Finding the most effective communication is crucial in sales, and conversational intelligence software has become a vital tool for all sales teams.
These platforms analyze meetings, phone calls, and more to deliver insights that someone taking notes might have missed or misinterpreted. While conversational intelligence software was once a nifty extra, teams are now adopting it as a must-have to improve win rates and identify the most effective concepts.
And rather than having managers sifting through countless recordings to listen for script deviation or winning points, conversational intelligence software can quickly scan all of the data for them.
Chorus (Zoominfo)
Zoominfo recently acquired Chorus, making it an even more comprehensive tool. Chorus’ dynamic AI captures concepts from customer phone calls, meetings, and emails to identify behavioral changes, emphasis, and more.
Gong.io
Gong.io takes the guesswork out of which keywords will win and close the deal and replicate the conversations of your top reps. Gong.io helps teams improve win rates, increase deal sizes, and accelerate employee ramp-up.
Scheduling
The term ‘phone tag’ will likely pass out of common usage with the use of real-time scheduling apps and platforms. Sending a calendar link and booking meetings from email or webchats is so easy and convenient. It’s almost annoying to have to send someone “the times you’re open” at this point.
If you don’t have a scheduling tool connected to your calendar, you can try these two for free and then get your whole team on board to start using the advanced features.
Calendly
If a prospect is already interested, Calendly puts the ball in their court and helps them connect with the basket. You can also screen scheduled meetings, demos, and more for priority.
Chili Piper
Chili Piper is a scheduling tool made for demand generation and sales teams. Instant Booker, Distro, and the Salesforce integration create smooth handoffs and routing and saves reps time with meeting logging.
Content Management System (CMS)
Whether your sales team is one or one of many, success or failure can depend on getting the right content to the right people as quickly as possible. Your CMS can help you create new content or manage existing content through storage and regulating workflows. And perhaps the greatest appeal of a CMS is that your team won’t have to develop specific technical expertise to create and move content. The CMS does all that for you, saving more precious time.
Seismic
A CMS like Seismic allows you to manage all your sales content in a single hub and cut down on sales prep time, boosting productivity for both new and seasoned reps.
HighSpot
So much more than a content library, HighSpot includes guidance, training, coaching for reps, and engagement tools for sellers.
Guru
Sales reps work across multiple platforms such as Google Docs and Slack. Guru captures information in all the platforms your team uses and then delivers it to wherever the sales reps work so they don’t waste time searching.
Guided Adoption
It’s more common than you think for companies to bring in new shelfware—oops, software—that never gets fully adopted. If the process of moving into the latest tech isn’t streamlined and intuitive, your sales team may resist, preferring to do things “the way we’ve always done them.” If you’ve invested in a software solution that you’re paying for, but your team can’t use, it’s no longer a solution—it’s a liability.
Guided adoption tools layer on top of your most used sales tech to provide real-time answers within the platform.
Spekit
Spekit takes your sales playbooks and training off static docs and adds “specs” on some of your most used sales tools with just-in-time guidance. These new kinds of playbooks allow teams to quickly update processes and steps and ramp new sellers faster.
Learn How to Identify & Develop a Sales Tech Stack That Fits Your Organization
No two sales tech stacks will look exactly the same. And your stack will change over time as your size, needs, clients, and industry change and grow. But it’s vital to identify the core platforms that will allow your sales teams to look up from tedious administrative tasks and get back to what matters—talking to the buyers.
If you’re ready to build a roadmap with the tech tools that will take you from surviving to thriving, check out our latest webinar on building your core tech stack from Series A to IPO.
If you’re just adopting the new, hot tech without evaluating your objectives and goals, you’re wasting your time.