How to Optimize Your Sales Tech Stack

What is the Sales Tech Stack?

The world of sales has become overrun with technology. With so much available, organizations often struggle to optimize their sales tech stack. The sales tech stack is an organization’s technological toolkit, filled with products, programs, and services that promise to improve sales efficiency, reduce sales cycle times, and lower operating costs.

However, this influx of technology can do the opposite when it isn’t used correctly. Sales reps feel overwhelmed by technology, sales enablement doesn’t have time to properly implement new tools, and sales leaders are overwhelmed with data. Without an optimized tech stack, these tools are often more of a headache than a solution.

Despite this challenge, sales leaders still need to choose if they want to move forward. In fact, they need to make several choices from what CRM solution they need to the right LMS software. To many, this has an unsettling resemblance to chaos theory, which is the idea that even the smallest change in initial conditions– like the features of a piece of sales tech – will eventually create dramatically different outcomes in the future.

The Sales Tech Stack and its’ Impact on Sales Leadership

The ever-growing sales tech stack needed to support high-performing sales teams and modern selling has made the sales leader’s job both easier and infinitely more complex. Today’s sales leader needs to be a combination of a sales coach, a technology expert, and have exquisite time management.

They need to be able to drive high-performing teams, drawing knowledge and intelligence from multiple technology platforms. If we look at a typical sales team today, they are likely to be using a combination of:

• CRM (Saleforce/Hubspot/Dynamics)
• BI / Performance Management Tools
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Call listening & intelligence (Gong / Refract)
• Outreach/sequencing tools (Salesloft / Outreach)
• Learning Management Systems
• Comms platforms (TEAMs or Slack)
• HR (Workday / Ultipro)
• Document Management & Storage
• Whiteboards & Excel
• OneNote for 1-2-1 meetings

Whilst all these platforms and technologies are hugely valuable in the task of performing a sales job, they present a challenge for sales leaders: “How do I aggregate all the data I have across these disparate systems to frame and drive a coaching conversation?”

Taking Charge of Your Tech Stack

To get the best out of the technologies and in turn the best out of our sales teams, we need to be able to correlate activity, behaviors, and performance improvements.

For example:

• My SDR team have just attended a Social Selling Master class [Via the Learning Management Solution (LMS)]
• I have set an objective for them to update their LinkedIn Profile and start engaging [via email]
• I have set them a target to increase their Sales Navigator prospecting [Whiteboard]
• The goal is to increase our response rate from LinkedIn to drive meetings.

As a leader, to do this I have:

1. An Excel sheet or dashboard from the LMS on who has attended each course
2. A note in my calendar to check LinkedIn profiles
3. A whiteboard with InMail targets Vs daily totals (written up by each rep)
4. A report in CRM tracking meetings booked

As a leader, I do not have any visibility of:

• Whether each individual has completed their objective on their LinkedIn profile
• The impact the training course has had on the LinkedIn SSI (Social Selling Index) Score for those who attended
• A benchmark of SSI scores across the team to see who has updated their profile fully
• A comparison and benchmark of #InMails Vs #InMail acceptances and whether this has improved since the training
• A correlation between InMail acceptances and meetings booked
• Analysis by individual and team against the ‘Social Selling’ and ‘Prospecting’ competencies defined for my team
• What’s working and what is not

In summary, I simply do not have the complete picture. I have blind spots all over the place and it is impacting my ability to identify coaching opportunities and success metrics across the team. It is impacting my ability to identify peer learning opportunities and where further training is required.

In addition, I cannot get a clear ROI on either the training investment or our use of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

As sales leaders, we need to recognize the value of each distinct solution in our tech stack, but we also need to have a central place where all of the valuable intelligence is brought together and can be used to drive coaching and improvement.

That’s where Richardson’s Accelerate Sales Performance System steps in. Instead of the sales leader doing the work, our system brings clarity to the most critical skill gaps affect business metrics. The best part? It does this by aggregating data from your entire rev tech stack, delivering personalized, ongoing capability development for sellers.

Sales leaders can take a breath. With this solution, sales leaders will see a real-time and continuous clear picture of their teams’ performance in the field, how the enablement and development efforts they are investing in are directly impacting their most important business metrics, and where their next move should be to sustain and build upon that performance.

They no longer have to hope their efforts are paying off. They will have the evidence at their fingertips. The Accelerate Sales Performance System enables the entire sales organization to build the capabilities that drive real-world results. Individual sellers get a personalized learning plan that continuously drives skill improvement, sales and revenue leaders get data-driven insights into how their team’s development is impacting revenue and where to go next.

Cut through the chaos with us and take control of your tech stack, sales team, and revenue results. Book a demo today to learn more about this comprehensive, one-of-a-kind solution.