Having a customer relationship management (CRM) system is no longer enough. Today, your sales team needs a comprehensive, well-picked sales tech stack to reduce administrative tasks, provide invaluable insights into leads, and guide them to success.
In this article, let’s discover the importance of a sales tech stack, what tools you should consider deploying for your business, and how to successfully build a sales stack.
What is a Sales Tech Stack?
A sales tech stack refers to a collection of tools, systems, platforms, and other solutions needed to run and manage sales teams as well as drive sales growth.
Sales Tech Stack Tools
Over the years, we’ve worked with businesses, sales leaders, sales managers, and sales representatives across industries. We’ve observed a set of sales technology tools that have been used by several companies and organizations worldwide to identify leads, manage customer relationships, acquire customers, and grow revenue.
The following sections will briefly cover the top 8 sales tools that have become the modern standard for most sales teams.
1. CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) tool is designed to help companies manage relationships with customers. It allows you to keep track of existing customers, manage conversations, automate communication, and improve customer retention.
Best CRM tools include:
- Salesforce offers various CRM categories and systems, including Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Data Cloud, Community Cloud, App Cloud, and IoT.
- HubSpot Sales Hub is a CRM tool with built-in sales enablement features like sales automation, sales template, and activity tracking. It also includes the ability to seamlessly integrate with more than 1,030 tools in HubSpot’s App Marketplace.
- Zoho CRM allows you to streamline sales, marketing, and customer support work processes. Its essential capabilities include journey orchestration, predictive sales and intelligence, business analytics, and remote-ready features that help keep in touch with prospects while working remotely.
2. Account Planning
An account planning tool makes it easier for your B2B sales reps to nurture and strengthen existing customer relationships. It helps identify the most profitable customers and discover their problems. From that, you can develop an actionable plan to grow your accounts.
Best account planning tools include:
- Revenue Grid offers a guided account-based selling solution that allows teams to plan and execute strategy across revenue teams. It guides your sales reps through nurturing, building relationships, and winning more key accounts.
- Kapta is an account management and customer engagement platform. It allows you to create a standardized account management process and assess risks as well as upsell potential.
- Revegy is a sales execution platform with built-in visualizations for account planning, providing sales teams with deal-winning insights.
3. Sales Enablement Tools
A sales enablement tool should be the core of your sales technology stack. It brings sales teams, marketing teams, and other revenue-focused stakeholders together to create an effective and efficient way to work with prospects and customers.
Having a sales enablement tool in place allows your sales reps to gain a complete picture of engagement activities. They can also get proper training and coaching to enhance their skill sets and work more productively.
Best sales enablement tools include:
- Revenue Grid offers a sales enablement platform powered by article intelligence (AI) and advanced data analytics. It makes your customer data complete automatically and provides AI-driven recommendations. It also helps you forecast confidently and understand whether your strategy is working.
- Seismic supports a wide range of sales enablement tools like content management, contextual content recommendations, content discovery, content collaboration, just-in-time training, and more.
- Highspot provides your reps with the right content for every conversation whenever they need it. It offers several features covering automation, analytics, integrations, security, and privacy.
4. Lead Generation Tools
A lead generation tool helps you identify people interested in your business’ product or service and capture their contact information (also called leads). It automates ongoing manual work and simplifies your lead generation funnel so you can focus on other areas of your sales process.
Best lead generation tools include:
- Revenue Grid offers the Sales Sequence tools allowing you to create personalized content and send it to your prospect automatically. Easy to connect with leads across channels, including email, calls, SMS, and social media.
- OptinMonster allows you to create eye-catching on-site lead generation campaigns like popups, slide-in windows, and gamified spin-to-win wheels to turn website visitors into leads.
- Clearbit is best known for finding leads and collecting data like name, location, email address, and occupation. It helps you discover, engage, and convert the most valuable customers.
5. Communication Tools
Communication tools include asynchronous text-based communication and real-time video collaboration. They are crucial for building strong relationships among team members as well as between your business with your customers.
Best communication tools include:
- Slack is one of the world-class text-based communication software, with organizations using it to chat both internally and externally with prospects and customers.
- Zoom has become a standard for video communication. It’s convenient for external meetings because your prospects don’t need to sign up for an account to join the meeting.
- AirCall is a cloud-based call center and phone system for modern businesses. Its features include call conferencing, toll-free numbers, call recording, and more.
6. LMS (Learning Management System)
A learning management system can empower sales leaders and managers to create practical training and coaching programs for their sales reps. It helps simplify creating educational content, developing courses, and delivering training materials to various audiences.
Best LMSs for sales include:
- iSpring is an eLearning platform to create interactive courses and assessments. It allows turning PowerPoint content into courses, creating quizzes and drag-n-drop activities, and more.
- Articulate 360 is a creator platform for workplace learning. It includes a library of 9+ million photos, templates, characters, videos, icons, and more.
- Docebo is an AI-based learning suite to create and manage content, deliver training, and measure the business impact of your programs. It also allows you to connect learning across your business systems with more than 400 integrations.
7. Sales Reporting Tools
Sales reporting tools are tools and systems that enable sales professionals and leaders to effectively track and evaluate sales activities as well as predict trends and results. It helps break sales down into understandable pieces to discover relevant insights to enhance performance.
Best sales reporting tools:
- Revenue Grid offers team analytics and forecasting tools to create detailed sales reports, evaluate risks, improve pipeline management, and create accurate forecasts.
- Clari uses AI to unlock predictive insights and gain visibility into team productivity and the health of your accounts, pipeline, and forecast.
- Gong provides you with a clear picture of your customer interactions, deals, and market changes. It also alerts you to risks and opportunities across your business.
8. Project Management Tools
Project management tools make it easier for your sales team to manage tasks, monitor progress, and report performance. It helps enhance work efficiency, facilitate team collaboration, and reduce miscommunication.
Best project management tools include:
- Monday.com is a comprehensive project management tool with several features designed for sales teams, like sales management, lead capture, contact management, customer onboarding, and more.
- ClickUp activates your sales team by bringing everything from lead tracking to customer onboarding and deal collaboration into one place. It also offers useful templates for account management, CRM, and commission tracking.
- Basecamp is a project management and team communication tool. It allows your team to break complicated tasks into separate projects and get everything done quicker and easier.
How to Build the Best Sales Tech Stack?
Building an effective sales tech stack takes a lot of time and effort. It requires you to research your current business situations and understand what your sales team needs to work smarter.
Here are some tips to help you get started:
- Determine why you want to have a sales tech stack — from business and customer perspectives.
- Ask your sales reps what they expect to get from new technologies.
- Do thorough research on vendors, from their offerings to pricing to customer support.
- Seek adaptability and scalability — your stack should encourage you to grow and scale.
We hope this article was helpful to you in creating a set of tools and systems to optimize your sales process and increase sales performance. Follow the Revenue Grid blog to keep updated with the latest sales technology stack.
