6min
The modern seller and their sales technology stack is a far cry from the archetypal salesperson of yesteryear. Running from car to office or coffee shop trailing handwritten notes, messages on scraps of paper and trying to capture everything on their own personal spreadsheet before they forget the contents of the phone call they just took from the client.
Modern sellers benefit from sales technology unavailable at any time in the past, and its providing teams all over the world with super powered productivity and the ability to sell to the client exactly when the client wants to be sold to – which is immediately following they send you the message!
Here are our top 10 technologies to get your sales team up to speed and spending ore of their precious time where its best served, in front of the client.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
The heart of any great sales tech stack, the CRM is the single source of truth for everyone in the business, especially the salesperson. An up-to-date CRM solves problems like not knowing what the client has asked for or previously had delivered, or what were those issues they had with us back last year? An organised system of record. It should be easy to use, easy to keep up to date and a good one is an essential for the modern sales team.
Good CRMs should automatically track things like calls and emails, as well as track the opening and reading of your emails to your clients.
It’s going to be almost impossible to efficiently scale your sales processes without a good CRM system.
- Check out our favourite HubSpot CRM
- Or maybe have a look at the stager, Salesforce
Sales Prospecting Tools
Prospecting used to mean aimlessly driving around town looking for a likely looking new business or wading through pages of the internet in search of clues to businesses that might suit your Ideal Client Profile.
Nowadays we can use tools that pull information straight from the website visitors we get, or get searchable data based on social media profiles on LinkedIn or private data bases created from scraping public data sources.
With the best tools on the market, you will even be able to get AI based recommendations of similarly featured leads based on your history of searching.
Prospecting tools are a HUGE time saver too, as the best ones will have accurate data and up to date lists of the people in your target companies.
Try out these:
- HubSpot Sales Leads (included in Sales Hub free and above)
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Lead Enrichment Tools
Something you’ll need for the most up to date and useful CRM data. Data enrichment means finding the missing pieces of the data you have and supplementing it so you get the best picture you can.
These tools crawl the web and match find your prospects and add in the most vital details like job title or telephone number and so on.
The best ones will also find technologies the prospect uses, company revenue, funding, headcount, recruitment activity and so on.
Vital for an accurate record, and of course, perfect for all you Account Based Marketer’s and Seller’s out there.
And it’s even better if your enrichment platform can integrate with your CRM to automagically update these records without any input from you directly.
Examples
Call Tracking and Call Analytics
This one can feel a little bit ‘big brother’ to your embattled sales reps. So, it’s really important to tell them why you feel the need to measure and monitor their calls.
To complete the picture of the client record is obviously to most, but the best software in this space can also pinpoint the sales phrases that are the most or least effective when it comes to winning or losing that all important business.
And when it comes to training nothing works better than a newbie listening to actual live (but recorded) calls to get the point the sales trainers are trying to make to them.
You can also filter sort and search calls for keywords. And of course, really sharpen up those all-important analytics. And another shout out for AI – as its often able to take these recordings and turn them into actionable insights.
Two of the best:
- HubSpot Call Tracking (included in Sales Hub Starter or above)
- Gong
Outreach / Email platforms
You’re looking for two things from an outreach tool, the automation of the most tedious aspects of emailing and the ability to report on the activity itself so decisions can be based on data rather than guess work.
I’m the first case, email scheduling and automated follow up, template personalisation and so on, and in the second case, tracking important metrics like open rates, click through rates, rejection rates and so on.
There’s nothing more annoying that forgetting to send that all important email, so scheduling email sends is super powerful, and uses powerful tried and tested templates can superpower your outreach, as well as enable you to work quickly and at scale.
And those reporting tools allow you to test your CTA’s, subject lines and body text to help drive better results too.
Check these out:
- HubSpot Email Marketing (included in Marketing Hub free or above) and Email Tracking (included in Sales Hub free or above)
- Buzzstream
Scheduling Tools
It’s such a faff trying to find a suitable time in your client’s busy diary, much less then combining it with a free spot in yours too! Scheduling tools make this so easy you’ll wonder how you ever survived before them.
You can apply them freely in texts, emails and direct messages, embed them into your websites ‘contact us’ page, or even add them to your email signature.
One word of warning though, in the UK especially we can come over a bit righteous when someone makes out like their time is more important than your own. So be careful to make sure they know it’s a time saving exercise, rather than a status one!
I like to offer an alternative time through the more traditional methods too, to try and balance the request and make it sounds like a request and not an order!
Two of the best for you to check out.
- HubSpot Meeting Scheduler (included with HubSpot free or above)
- Calendly
Video Chat and Screensharing tools
Popularised during the pandemic, video calls are everywhere. They allow salespeople and anyone else for that matter, to talk to prospects and customers at their convenience and wherever they are all over the world.
There are somethings to be careful about like so called Zoom fatigue or not giving yourself enough of a break in between what can quickly become back-to-back meetings. Not only from an eyesight perspective using those screens as much as we do now, but also to just decompress after concentrating on the previous call. We used to have travel time between meetings a few years ago, bit now it’s too easy to hop from one to another straight away.
Having said all that, nothing beats video for a way to increase face to face interaction with your client, or to give live demos and presentations.
The best systems (like Zoom integrated with HubSpot) let you shift from email to chat to video and have it all recorded in the CRM automatically too.
Here we go with two of the best:
Live Chat
One of the highest closing sales tools out there. When customers are there, on your site and looking to buy, a helpful live chat window can make all the difference. That’s a big deal when 82% of consumers consider an immediate response as important to sales questions.
There is now a plethora of chat tools out there so make sure the one you go for can route messages to the right person or if there are no agents available, send the chat requests to a well-designed chat bot that can offset some of the inconvenience of having to wait.
Great live chat tools send messages to a universal inbox with a view of text messages, emails and live chat requests at the same time. This gives agents the full picture and allows them to eventually settle on the clients preferred method of communication too, another plus point.
Here are our favourites:
- HubSpot Live Chat (included in HubSpot free or above)
- Zendesk Support Suite
Sales Reporting Software
We’ve all been there, last thing on a Friday someone up the chain ‘demands’ a new or up to date report. There’s nothing for it, rerun those spreadsheets, make sure there are no mistakes and use that sixth sense to join the dots where the data doesn’t seem to add up!
CRM powered sales reporting makes those nightmare scenarios a think of the past, finally! Accurate data is a must, as is the ability to quickly pull reports together, update others, and automatically send them seamlessly to all the right people.
You need to understand those pain points, and what they mean for the success or otherwise of your sales campaigns and strategies. Replicate good work and allocate budget and resources based on reliable forecasts. And above all else demonstrate the ROI of the team to the various stakeholders.
Great reporting software also allows for customisable reporting of KPI’s, sales funnels, channel attribution and reports.
Two well worth looking at:
- HubSpot Sales Tracking Software (included in Sales Hub free or above)
- Looker Sales Analytics
Project Management Tools
As soon as to do lists and back of the fag packet notes to each other are outgrown the search turns quickly to a reliable and robust project management software. These tools help you keep track of planned tasks and deadlines and track your progress against KPIs.
Especially useful when the sales team are collaborating with customer success or engineering teams. They also give a great oversight of the whole picture from the sale through implementation.
This is one of the most regularly requested add owns for us as HubSpot partners is to find a project management software that integrates well with our CRM and sales tools of choice, so we are familiar with a whole host of them.
We prefer tools that help automate as well as track tools and of course those that update the central CRM of choice to, so that we can ensure the single source of truth is just that.
Here are two you must look at:
So that completes our round up of the most valuable sales tech tools and the ones you should be looking to add to your stack.
Please get in touch if you have any questions on any of these products and we’ll be happy to chat!
