The sales landscape is ever-changing, and succeeding isn’t an easy job. Sellers need an abundance of skills, knowledge, and passion to hit their numbers. They also need access to the best sales tools in order to be productive and effective in their roles.
While the current state of the economy has led to budget cuts and tougher purchasing decisions, leaders are more cautious than ever when it comes to investing in a new piece of technology. After all, every dollar counts to avoid negatively impacting employee turnover, performance, and revenue growth. Therefore, sales leaders are looking to implement new sales tools from which their sellers and the entire organization will benefit most.
What are sales tools?
This term often describes the systems and platforms that go-to-market (GTM) teams use to make their jobs easier. Sales tools encompass customer relationship management, prospecting, data integration, and much more. This means that every sales team can benefit from sales tools, but it’s still important to select those that address your team’s specific needs. So when it comes to looking for the best sales tools for your team, look for those that do the following:
- Streamline workflows: Sales software should improve your sellers’ day-to-day workflow. By using sales tools that complement or integrate with one another, teams can reduce repetitive work and any friction they experience when working through everyday tasks.
- Optimize the sales process: Sales tools provide a way to handle lead generation, tracking, and scoring, all in one place. They also enable you to automate certain parts of the sales process, improve communication, and significantly enhance productivity.
- Improve buyer engagement: Optimally designed sales tools for prospecting have everything you need to draw in an audience, track prospect data, and formulate a buyer persona. By doing this, you can create sales content that improves engagement and accelerates deals.
- Provide key data and insights: Sales tools also help you track, organize, utilize, and optimize the accessibility of data and insights that are vital to your sales team. These insights are extremely beneficial when it comes to measuring performance and identifying areas of improvement.
Important steps to take before implementing a new sales tool
Getting the right sales tools and software is very important, so you don’t want to make a purchase without some due diligence. Here are three things that you should look into and consider before committing to any sales tool.
1. Talk to sellers
The first step is to talk to frontline sellers and solicit their input. In a 2021 seller motivation survey, 59% of companies said that adopting new sales technologies will generally hinder their overall sales efficiency. That’s bad news if you want your sellers to embrace new software. To encourage the adoption of new sales tools, speak with your sellers to determine their pain points. Instead of dropping a new system on them, learn what resources they need and present the benefits you expect to provide them.
2. Look at the market
Once you have the input and information from your sellers about what sales tools you should be looking for, don’t just buy the first option you come across. Look at the options available and compare them to learn which is ideal for your team’s needs. Then, talk to other customers who use the tool to get a good understanding of its advantages and disadvantages.
3. Review performance data and metrics
Lastly, review your team’s performance metrics before and after implementing the new sales tool. Compare them and note where improvements occurred and which sellers benefited most. If there’s no significant change, revisit your strategy and implementation to ensure you’re utilizing the tool correctly.
Never stop growing.
5 sales tools that every great tech stack needs
Even if you know what you’d like from your sales software and tools, it can still be hard to figure out which option is best. Here’s a list of sales enablement tools you should consider for your GTM team:
1. Sales content management
A sales content management system is an essential sales management software. It enables sellers to find, access, and customize content for each of their prospects, all in one location. This makes optimizing the buyer experience easier since sellers can provide the most relevant and useful content possible.
2. Content automation
Sales content automation ensures your sellers stay on brand when sharing content with prospects. This type of sales tool is a great way to give sellers as much or little flexibility to customize content so you know that everything they’re sharing is as accurate as possible.
3. Digital sales rooms
A digital sales room gives prospects a single location to access all deal-related content This helps sellers navigate multi-stage deal cycles and streamline the content experience for buyers.
4. Training and coaching
New hires need in-depth training and coaching during the onboarding process. But some sales leaders don’t realize they should also provide experienced sellers with supplemental training and coaching throughout their careers. Sales software offers new and veteran sellers training content and resources that sharpen their skills and hone their sales techniques.
5. Sales analytics
Without tracking which content is most effective in turning prospects to customers, the marketing team won’t know what content is most useful to sellers.t. Without analytics, the selling team also can’t work optimally. Sales enablement intelligence helps you turn data into actionable insights for improved performance.
What’s missing from your sales tech stack?
Seismic offers the best sales tools needed to empower customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, data, and insights they need to succeed. If you’re ready to improve your team’s productivity and efficiency, see how the Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is the perfect solution to complete your tech stack.
