How to Close Sales: Building a Winning Sales Tech Stack

Over the past five years, the explosion of sales tech has made it almost impossible for teams to keep up, going from hundreds to thousands of tools in just a few short years.

Automating scheduling, reminders, basic back and forth with buyers, pulling qualified prospect lists, and making our lives easier with data aggregation – you name it – the tool exists.

A good portion of sales leaders and salespeople have been around a block or two and learned to do many sales activities manually. But the world has changed and all these activities that took away from time selling, but were essential, can now be done faster and often better.

If you want to close more deals, you need to build a winning tech stack that allows you to eliminate 20-30% of the activities sellers previously did manually and apply that time to actually selling.

Remembering to follow up with people, logging emails, updating information – there’s an app for that.

We’ve done the research; 52% of sales professionals spend 10% – 30% of their time on operational and technical tasks, and only 32.5% of their time selling.

This is why sales technology – specifically the right technology – is so important to your organization. By removing repetitive, manual tasks sales tech allows Sales to focus on closing more deals.

What to avoid when implementing a winning sales tech stack.

Before we get into the kind of tools you should include in your winning tech stack, let’s talk about where teams fail and end up wasting time and money instead of optimizing their time and generating more revenue.

When buying a new tool or a set of tools, teams don’t think enough about change management and formulating a plan beforehand.

If you’ve ever heard of the technology hype curve – we’ve put our own spin on it according to what we’ve seen in hundreds of sales teams – it’s commonplace to buy a new tool, generate a ton of excitement around the benefits and what it can do for the team, do an initial training, and then set it and forget it.

When it comes to implementing a winning tech stack, continuous optimization of your sales tech needs to be a prominent part of the plan.

As most sales tech is now SaaS you can expect your solutions to have frequent updates, often including new features, integrations, etc.

Initial deployment and training is step zero. You have to help sales teams become power users, integrate it into their daily tasks, provide ongoing training as your team grows and features are added, and continually optimize tools to fit into and improve the sales process.

What’s in a winning sales tech stack?

Every company’s needs are different, but I’m going to cover the best-in-class tools available to sales teams now and the most important ones to the typical sales process.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn is the top social platform used by professionals, and therefore one of the best places to connect with B2B buyers.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows Sales to quickly aggregate lists of buyers from LinkedIn’s extensive network using its search and filter features, find ways to interact with them by looking at different insights, and most importantly, build relationships.

SalesIntel

A LinkedIn profile can only tell you so much about a buyer, however, and they have to be active on the platform. So the next tool you’ll need is a data source. Preferably one that provides contact data, intent data, and date enrichment like SalesIntel.

You also want to verify the accuracy of your data source. SalesIntel, for instance, provides 95% human-verified contacts with direct dial and mobile numbers.

A data source helps you build, enrich, and target a list of prospects within your ICP.

Outreach.io

Outreach is the best-in-class sales engagement platform hands down. Best reporting, best UI, best data, and it’s the best in terms of creating “activity holders.”

If we’re talking about the best tech, we don’t want a tool that’s built just for sending all.

Outreach creates a workflow of activity holders so your team never has to remember whom to follow up with and when. It has features to create templates and snippets per buyer persona and campaign, but it allows sales teams to go in and still customize their messaging at scale.

InsightSquared

InsightSquared is not a platform you look at retrospectively each month. It’s a platform that helps you make data-driven decisions and allows you to optimize your processes and messaging.

You’ll be able to better manage your sales pipeline with activity capture, guided selling, interactive reporting, and AI-driven forecasting.

Gong.io

Gong is a conversation intelligence tool and really the ultimate sales coaching platform. It’s an AI-powered tool that helps sales teams understand what sets their top performs apart so other reps can replicate them.

Gong arguably has the best natural language processing technology for phone calls to measure efficiency and coach calls.

Sendoso

If direct mail and gifting are part of your sales outreach (and it should be), Sendoso is one of the best platforms out there in terms of options and easy integration into sales workflows and tools. Even more, Sendoso is always innovating on their offerings ensuring you’ll always find something to break through the noise and catch your prospect’s eyes. Look no further than their recent addition of Cameo as an option to send to prospects.

Seismic

Seismic is a leader in sales enablement. Buyers expect personalized experiences and relevant content. Seismic is a one-stop shop for managing, automating, and distributing all of the content sales needs to close deals.

Salesforce

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool is the backbone of any sales organization. A CRM like Salesforce can be a single source of truth for lead, contact, and account data; opportunity and pipeline management; activity tracking; reporting and dashboards; etc.

You cannot run a successful sales organization without a CRM platform, especially as CRM’s have become the central integration hub that all of your other pieces of sales tech connect to.

Newoldstamp

Newoldstamp is an effective email signature generator that provides businesses with the possibility to create, customize, and deploy professional email signatures across the entire organization. A well-designed email signature can bring hundreds of sales opportunities every day with every email sent.

With the help of Newoldstamp, the salespeople can effortlessly insert promotional banners to their email signatures, along with call-to-actions to catch the recipients’ interest and make their sales emails stand out.

Having standardized email signatures can be extremely useful in staying memorable and keeping prospects engaged. Newoldstamp, an email signature generator, also comes with built-in email signature analytics that enables sellers to track the effectiveness of different CTAs and banner campaigns.

Putting it all together

If we put it all together, a winning tech stack is integrated into your sales processes and optimizes each step your reps take.

• Tools like Sales Navigator and SalesIntel build your lists and give you insights into your buyers.
• Outreach.io gives you a way to put those lists into action and start connecting with buyers.
• Gong allows you to have better conversations and replicate your best reps.
• Seismic puts more information into your reps’ hands than buyers want.
• Sendoso makes a lasting impression.
• InsightSquared provides invaluable data into your process and pipeline and helps you to optimize everything faster.
• And Salesforce stores all of your information and activities.

Accurate lists, faster engagement, better conversations, and more information. That’s how you’re going to close more deals with a winning tech stack.

Jake Dunlap

Jake Dunlap designs repeatable, sustainable sales models and processes that outperform industry standards. As the Founder and CEO of Skaled, Jake helps executives around the world accelerate business growth with data-backed sales solutions. Before building Skaled, he held the roles of VP of Sales at Nowait (acquired by Yelp), Head of Sales + Customer Success at Chartbeat, and VP of Sales at Glassdoor (acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion dollars in 2018).

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/