The Essential Sales Stack

Did you know that the tech you use every day has a direct impact on the deals you close?

According to a LinkedIn survey, 73% of salespeople use technology to close more deals, and 97% of salespeople said that technology is either important’ or ‘very important’ to their sales process.

But before making any changes to your sales function, you’ve got to understand your sales process completely.

What’s in a sales tech stack?

To put it bluntly, pretty much every kind of tool you can think of. Everything from social media platforms like LinkedIn to Zoom, Google Docs, CRMs, Slack, Whatsapp, and Calendly is useful…there’s a huge technology stack that sales reps need to be confident in.

Your sales tech stack will include any of the following tools and software:

• Lead generation and sales prospecting tools
• Internal communication tools
• Engagement and outreach sales stack
• Analytics and automation tools
• Documentation software
• Sales enablement stack

The sales stack software and tools you need

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRMs will store all of your contacts (both leads and customers), as well as track and review their entire history. You will also be able to see which users opened emails, booked an appointment, engaged with your site, and even who has booked an appointment.

By using all of the information provided by the CRM, your sales function will be able to provide personalised sales recommendations and outstanding support to users.

If you plan on using Hubspot to manage your marketing campaigns, its CRM is a great way to follow your customers and leads all the way through your sales funnel. Hubspot offers many key sales and marketing tools, an easy to use intuitive dashboard, and vast capabilities at every payment level.

Salesforce’s CRM platform is a great tool when your business needs to become more advanced. It is more customisable than Hubspot, and offers better pricing for more complex features. Salesforce is a platform for large enterprises with a more robust sales team.

Outreach

Time is money in the world of sales. And so, the less time your AEs (account executives) and SDRs (sales development reps) are distracted performing secondary tasks - like lead and company research - the more time they have to reach out or follow up with prospects and close sales. 

That’s why it’s so important to have data available to help speed up your processes.

Both SDRs and AEs can utilise the data provided through LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator (a paid LinkedIn service). Use this software to find companies and leads to target, optimise your outreach, and directly engage with prospects.

Zoominfo is also a useful tool to help your SDRs capture information about companies more efficiently. The FormComplete tool allows your business to minimise forms while maintaining the data you acquire.

Communication

When working in our hybrid world, it’s important to make sure your team can easily communicate with each other, as well as set up calls with prospects on easy to use and accessible software.

Who isn’t using Zoom today? It’s one of the most popular and easiest software tools to set up virtual meetings after all.

‍Slack’s messaging platform - especially among tech businesses and scaleups - has become the industry standard for team communication.

Once your sales reps have the tools and software to perfect their craft, they will be able to close more deals and earn more revenue.

 Gong

Gong is a software tool that records, transcribes, and analyses sales calls to offer tips for salespeople to drive their sales effectiveness.

Otter

‍As Gong is a paid service, you may want to try out Otter.ai to record your sales calls. The free tool (although you can pay to increase the amount of recording minutes you can have per month), allows teams or individuals to review and analyse how best to improve your sales skills.

SalesLoft

‍Both SDRs and BDRs (business development representatives) can benefit from SalesLoft as it helps automate outreach, manage calls and email in one platform, as well as track their progress. The tool can also provide insights and tips for optimising engagement.

YesWare

‍If you want to track, schedule, and even write better emails, YesWare can be added to your Gmail account to do so. 

Lavender

‍And if you’re still on the lookout for a tool that can help you write better sales emails, Lavender suggests new sentences and phrasing, once it has compared your original email against millions of other sales emails out there.

Vidyard

‍Video is a great way to engage prospects, especially in today’s digital working world. So, why only send text emails when you can create and send videos that can be even more engaging; while also allowing your sales function to understand individual prospects' interests by tracking how much of the video they watched?

Vidyard enables you to incorporate video into your prospecting efforts, be hyper personalised and humanise you in the eyes of your prospect.

Hubspot Sales Hub

Hubspot Sales Hub creates a great kanban interface for you to maintain deal velocity by understanding where deals are stalling and the ability to diagnose where problems and their solutions may lie to keep deals moving.

Sales-first software & analytics

In many instances, your CRM will overlap with sales-facilitating and analytics software, but sometimes they can be an entirely separate entity too. 

Sales software and analytics will help your brand to find opportunities to sell more. Features usually include:

• Conversation tracking with leads and customers to help you facilitate sales, including automated follow-ups 
• Native demo- or call-booking
• Custom deal creation 
• Sales forecasting
• Detailed analytics about sales

This is one of the most important sales categories out there, so it’s important to choose a tool that works for your entire team.

SalesForce is easily the top sales-focused tool on the market right now. They have more advanced and customizable features, which is why it’s regarded as one of the top industry tools right now.

SalesForce can get pricey, so if you need a more budget-friendly tool, HubSpot is comparable here with their features (especially once you get into their paid plans).

Integration

Some techs stack together to create your workflow, but some don’t, which is why you may need some extra tools to help.

Take Zapier for example which links everything together without needing an API - making it great for automation.

Tray.io does something similar, but is a little more techy, so if you’re an architect who really wants to get down to the nitty gritty, it’s worth considering.

Sales technology stacks can be limited by how your different pieces of technology communicate with each other. If they’re not open API based, trying an integrator will be beneficial. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to see your mundane, manual processes automated with only slight human interaction needed when required.

Customer success 

Grid, an Icelandic company helps users create beautiful (their words) web documents from Excel spreadsheets. Let’s be honest, Excel spreadsheets are invaluable but they aren’t riveting to look at, this tool transforms them with little to no effort.

Asana is a great project management tool to use instead of an account plan. If you have quarterly business reviews (QBRs) with your End of Year or customer reviews, then it’s a great way to track customer goals and help them break them down into actionable steps to achieve them.

How to improve your sales strategy

You can track how your prospects and clients find you with your CRM. Is it through referrals, networking, certain publications, or events?

You might find that you get a lot of leads from one, but they don’t convert to as many closed sales. This is why it’s important to know where your customers come from, so you know where to concentrate your efforts.

Website live chat

Sales teams today aren’t just doing business via phones, many are in fact spending more time on live website chat, which allows reps to chat with prospects in real time when they’re on their website.

Tools like Drift, ZenDesk Chat, and Intercom allow reps to see which page prospects are on, giving sales reps insight into what prospects are interested in buying and the questions they have.

Website live chat tools are also really useful for lead capture.

Artificial Intelligence tools

By utilising artificial intelligence tools in your tech sales stack, your sales teams can gather more intelligent information about their prospects and reduce time spent on less fruitful tasks, freeing them up to build relationships with prospects.

Check out AI sales tools like Cogito, Chorus, and Saleswhale.

Sales presentation software

Sales teams need a solution to deliver visual, structured sales presentations. And this can be achieved on Google Slides, Keynote, PowerPoint, Beautiful.AI, or even the snazzy Prezi deck.

Phone tracking software

Phone tracking software has been an essential sales tool for a while now, as it enables companies to see how many calls reps make, how much time they spend on calls, and how many calls they’re missing. It also allows sales managers to check on the quality of their rep’s calls.

If you aren’t already using an in-house phone tracking software, you could check out an online tool like justcall.io to see if it fits for your business.

Final thoughts

As you build your sales team’s sales stack, the first thing you need to do is look at the tools you’re already using, as this will inevitably shape the tools you add to the list.

If you already have some tools and are looking to build upon your existing stack, you’ll want tools that:

• Replace existing tools that you’re unhappy with
• Fill any gaps in the tools that you’re already using and want to continue using
• Integrate with existing tools that you want to continue using

But if you’re starting from scratch, the best place to start will be making a list of the specific needs you have for the types of tools you want to add, as this will help you decide which software is right or wrong for you.

Most tools will offer either free trials or demos so you can be confident that you’ll find the tech that works best for your brand and sales team.