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Sales Tech Stack
What is the sales tech stack?
A sales technology stack is the set of software that businesses use to optimize their sales processes and teams. Your sales tech stack should include CRM, customer engagement, lead generation, and automation software. Read this post to learn about the best sales tech stack tools, pros and cons of each tool, and what each costs.
With the best sales tech tools, you can help your team spend less time on administrative tasks while automating them, giving your team more time to focus on selling your product.
Why do you need a sales tech stack?
Now that you know what the sales stack means, let us talk about the benefits of having a sales tech stack.
Streamlined sales funnels
A sales funnel describes each step in the buyer journey until the moment when he or she makes the purchase. Every company wants their customers to move quickly and successfully through their sales pipeline. But it is not that simple, because 79% of marketing leads never make it to the purchase step of a sales pipeline. You can give your company a chance to drive more leads into the closing stages of the sales pipeline by using the sales technology stack. These tools have features that are necessary for understanding how buyers react to various sales funnel touchpoints, as well as what might prevent them from moving forward in your pipeline.
Less manual work, more time
If you do not have a cold outreach email software, it takes time to manually import contacts, manage leads, and close sales. Save your team all that time using the automation features of sales technology stack tools. Not every sales tech tool offers a wide range of automations across all of your workflow processes. However, every software will have an element of automation in place to optimize the features it provides.
Better customer experience
Customer experience is one of the most critical elements in business. If your customers experience is poor, they are not going to buy, and they are not going to come back.
Since sales technology stack tools can save time with automation, as well as give insight into the buyers journey, youall have a lot of insights that can be used to improve the UX. You will find that some sales tech stack tools feature artificial intelligence capabilities that offer insights based on the productivity of your sales team. These features are perfect for improving customer service efforts.
Business insights
Data analytics is something that every company needs in order to change its marketing approaches, customization tactics, and lead generation strategies. Sales technology stack tools enable brands to use data to figure out pain points for their audiences, weaknesses in the sales team, and other critical aspects for improvement.
How many tools in your stack?
The number of sales tech stack tools needed depends on your team’s size, your product offerings, and your sales pipelines length. As a rough guide, two thirds of companies use anywhere from 4 to 10 sales tech stack tools.
CRM software: If you are unfamiliar, CRM in digital marketing stands for customer relationship management. These tools typically offer powerful sales features, which are applicable to each step of the buyers journey, etc. CRM tools make sure that your sales pipeline is in the right place, that you are hitting revenue goals. The CRMs we are going to look at for your sales technology stack are Salesforce and SalesLoft.
Communication Software: Communication is critical, and the right communications software allows you to build and sustain continuous communications, on multiple channels, in real-time. Using the right communications software in your sales technology stack will enhance your lead nurturing, sales, and customer service support–all in one place, accessible by each team member who needs to pick up where the other left off, ensuring continuity and efficiency.
Demo creation software: A cornerstone to a successful sales pitch and post-sales customer support is using excellent demos. Demo building platforms make it easy to build detailed, personalised demos for sales and support. They let you clone your site to create a demo environment that looks and acts exactly like your site, so that you can show your leads and customers exactly how you can help solve their unique problems.
Lead generation software: We understand the pain of manually collecting email addresses for cold email marketing. It is hard work, and you are not always successful. Fortunately, there are plenty of solutions out there to generate leads software to complement your sales technology stack. One of the solutions that we are going to explore is LeadFuze.
Automation Software: While all of the software tools we mentioned above have automation capabilities, what you want is a tool that is solely focused on automation tasks. This type of software allows you to automate steps other software does not. Zapier is an automation software that we are going to look at for your sales technology stack.
While those are the main tools you will need for your sales tech stack, there are others that you might want as well. For instance, many brands are also using planning tools.
How do you assess sales tools for your stack?
How Big is your business and team? If you are a smaller company with just a few employees, then maybe you do not need an extensive sales technology stack tools list. It is critical that you understand the growth of your business and your team in order to determine which software you will need, and how robust it needs to be.
What aspects of your sales pipeline should be automated and optimized? You might not want to automate and optimize every single point in your sales pipeline and workflow.
For instance, one company might think that it would benefit from automating their contracts and billing. But another might choose to automate their lead-generation strategy. Will Your Team Use This Technology?.
Speak with your sales team before choosing sales technology stack tools Your sales team will have firsthand knowledge about what they spend more time working on, as well as the things that customers are complaining about. Choose tools your team can study.
Will those tools positively impact your revenues? This question is critical, as sales technology stacks are costly. If a piece of software does not improve ROI directly, then it is useless to own. As we mentioned earlier, selling technology stacks are expensive.
Determine your budget, and then pick tools that are best suited to your brand. What kind of integration capabilities you want. Most selling technology stack tools provide integration capabilities. But the number of possible integrations will generally impact which plan you are able to select.
Analyze your existing sales technology stack, and determine whether a new tool you want to add is capable of integrating with it. If you donat have a sales tech stack, make sure that whatever tools you do pick are capable of working seamlessly together.
Here’s a brief rundown of the best lead generation software to include in your sales tech stack
Visitor Queue is a B2B lead generation lead generation software which helps you to get leads out of website visitors who are not converts. The software gives you a birds-eye view of each visitors time on your site, then gives you all of the critical information needed to reach out to and engage them again, including company details, main contacts, direct contact info, and details about their social media accounts. Visitor queue provides real-time tracking of leads, so that you can target and reach leads right away, before they get the opportunity to decide and opt for someone else.
Leadfeeder is B2B lead generation software that allows you to convert anonymous web traffic to leads by identifying their source, and contact details, and their behaviors and engagement on your site. The software integrates directly with your CRM and lead emails, allowing you to configure automated lead assignments according to your own customized criteria. Leadfeeder provides you a database of business and employee contact information to effectively target your outreach.
Hunter.io is a cloud-based lead generation software to search for and validate email addresses across domains, companies, and specific individuals.
The software integrates directly with major CRMs, Gmail and Outlook, Zapier, and countless other third-party applications. It even serves as a free cold email outreach platform, so you can send leads to Hunt directly. Hunter is a super-simple, yet powerful, tool to simplify your outreach. The interface is super easy and simple to learn, while providing you with the necessary information to contact the right people in a business for your particular proposal.
Fiverr is an online marketplace to hire freelancers and other professionals to perform lead generation research and build a list for you. There are thousands of lead generation services and lead generation experts available, so you are sure to find someone with the right experience finding leads for your unique business.
Fiverr has helpful search filters that can help you narrow your search down and find a pro who offers exactly what you are looking for. As its name suggests, services or gigs start at $5, rising depending on your work requirements and the level of experience required. Using Fiverr has the added benefit of being able to manage your freelancers all in one place, while an escrow payment system keeps you from having your funds released for jobs that fall short of your requirements.
Here’s a brief rundown of the best CRM software to use in your sales technology stack.
Pipedrive is a multi-award-winning CRM software for businesses and teams of any size. The CRM is a powerful tool that prioritizes effectiveness and user-friendliness, helping you and your team optimize and refine sales and customer support. Pipedrive brings together all of the key aspects a great CRM needs, forming a powerful yet easy-to-use platform for everything you need, from one end of the sales pipeline to the other.
Freshsales by Freshworks is a fully featured service that allows you to manage your end-to-end customer relationship. You can customize your comms and create data-based content through a number of diverse channels. Freshsales is a great solution for your business, no matter its size, if you need a complete CRM solution to manage your entire customer journey.
Salesforce is a popular choice of sales and marketing technology stack tools. This software allows businesses to have just their sales cloud, but Salesforce offers the other products too, such as a marketing cloud and a customer service cloud, individually, or you can purchase these together to get a complete solution.
Many businesses, large and small, rely on Salesforce to help them automate workflow processes and deliver deep analytics and predictive analytics.
Here’s a brief rundown of the best communications and automation software to have in your sales technology stack.
ActiveCampaign is the leading platform for automating the customer experience, making it easy to communicate with and engage with your customers. It has an extensive array of pre-built marketing automations for email, CRM, and all forms of digital communications.
ActiveCamaign also offers outstanding features for segmentation and personalization across email, social media, direct message, chat, and text/SMS. It supports a wide range of integrations, and is one of the easiest and most user-friendly platforms to work with. The drag-and-drop functionality makes it particularly ideal for those not versed in HTML, yet who needs to be able to create custom templates.
Zapier. If you have been working in the digital marketing field for any length of time, then you may have heard of, or already know of, Zapier. Zapier is the holy grail of automation software. This tool allows for 3rd-party integrations with more than 4000 apps! You can count on Zapier to automate each step of your sales pipeline.
ZoomInfo is a B2B company platform that has an ongoing, regularly updated database of insights, intelligence, and purchasing intent data on various companies and contacts. The platform also includes multiple tools for communications, engagement, and data management that will help you target and engage with prospects in relevant and meaningful ways. Zoominfo integrates with countless other tools and is a critical piece of your sales technology stack, helping you close more deals and increase your conversion rates.
Here’s a brief overview of the best demo building software to use in your sales tech stack.
Walnut. If you are looking for a sales tech stack tool to help you connect with your audience through interactive, custom demos, then look no further than Walnut. Brands can build product demos for their sales, marketing, and customer success teams. It is not hard to learn how to use the tool, and you can build demos within minutes after mastering the skill.
Replay is a No-Code platform to build demos for sales & marketing. It is a highly-scalable, enterprise-ready platform, giving you the power to build professional demos with zero coding required. It is an extremely straightforward, user-friendly platform, offering everything you need to build awesome demos, using application hijacking, screen capturing, and real-time or guided recordings.
Replay is one of the only demo building platforms to have been certified with a SOC 2 Type 2 from the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), demonstrating their commitment to data security and privacy.
Demostack is a demo building platform that makes it really easy to clone your site in order to build a real-world demo environment, showing viewers exactly what to expect and how to use your product. It is a No-Code platform, providing a number of advanced features with the simplicity of a point-and-click editor.
With Demostack, you can easily add everything from embedded content, to animations, drop-down lists, and custom pop-ups in your demos, all fully customisable, so that you can build really tailored, custom demos.
CONCLUSION
Having a sales technology stack is an awesome decision if you want to optimize the workflows of your team and your business processes. How many tools you need for a sales tech stack depends on your companys size, what processes you would like to automate, and what your brands offerings are. However, your sales tech stack should include CRM, lead generation, communications, and engagement software.
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