Your sales tech stack, also called a sales enablement technology stack, is the system of tools your team uses to supercharge your sales cycles and keep all your sales activity in one convenient location for ease of tracking, management, and improvement.
Each platform in a sales tech stack prioritizes a different aspect of the sales relationship – customer satisfaction, product success, sales metrics, etc – and all of them are useful when it comes to enhancing the various aspects of your business.
But how do you build the best tech stack for your team? Which software is right for you – and is it worth investing in?
In this article we’ll answer:
- What are CRMs?
- What is marketing automation?
- What is a sales engagement platform?
- What is a sales enablement platform?
- What are the key differences between each platform?
- What are the benefits of investing in and upgrading your sales tech stack?
Since you’d have no sales without customers, let’s start with them…
Customer Relationship Management tools or CRMs
Customer relationship management is the system you use to track your interactions with your customer’s data. The purpose – to analyze a large amount of information about your customer’s history with your products.
Using this data you can easily target ads and sales pitches based on customers’ purchase history with your company.
This is the new age of technology!. We can track everything – and use it to enhance customer experiences to meet all of their convenience-cravings when it comes to making purchases.
As a helpful bonus, these systems typically send reminders about when to follow-up with leads and flag hot prospects for your sales reps to get a handle on which leads are worth investing time and energy in.
CRMs will help your business on the way to greatness, there’s no doubt about that – Apple and Amazon are two examples of CRM strategies gone right – but this isn’t the only useful software tool at your disposal.
Some examples include: Hubspot, Monday.com, Salesforce
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is technology that manages your marketing processes, for example the automated messages that you may want to send to customers through email, social media, and other channels.
Read our blog on the benefits of an omni-channel approach to sales.
Using an automation system will help you promote your brand faster because it hits your customers on all the channels automatically.
This is a great option for increasing your revenue and supercharging your sales team’s efficiency because the qualified leads you generate still need nurturing before they’re ready to buy, and the right technology will do the nurturing for you so that your sales reps aren’t burnt-out on grunt work by the time the lead is ready for direct contact.
There are other great benefits to marketing automation, if you’re interested.
Automation may be built into a CRM like Hubspot, or be part of a sales enablement platform like Hyperio.
Sales Engagement Platform
A sales engagement platform tracks your customer’s interactions with your products at each point along the buyer’s journey through the sales funnel – from the customer’s private research that brings them to your site, to the moment the sale is closed – to allow your company to easily keep track of each customer, and enhance customer relationships with your products and your brand name.
Long before a sales rep or software platform makes direct contact with a lead, your customer is developing an intellectual relationship with your brand. Is your company easy to engage with through various channels? Do you use online chat services so that they can easily connect with your company any time, anywhere?
These are things that today’s post-Covid buyers are looking for when they make a decision to buy a product – so by improving your engagement efforts, you’re going to improve sales.
The data gathered by the software brings juicy customer details directly to your sales reps inboxes, so that they have the information they need to establish rapport and build connections with their leads and close those sales.
If the software is great, then sales engagement platforms bridge the gaps between marketing automation and CRM software by leveraging artificial intelligence developed to drive things like contact management data enrichment, text analysis of written and transcribed content, voice analysis, and workflow optimization.
Technology like this, especially in the hands of experienced sales professionals, give you the edge over your competition.
Sales Enablement Platform
Sales enablement is the prioritization of giving your team of sales reps the tools they need to finalize sales deals – and if you’re reading this list the way we are, then these platforms are definitely part of the toolkit your reps need!
Sales enablement includes a lot of different factors – from recruitment to training to measuring the success of different techniques. It also includes investing in the right software so that your reps aren’t burnt out by slogging through grunt work that AI software has been designed to take care of.
Don’t worry – this doesn’t make humans redundant at all. Customers still want – need? – human-to-human contact, and that’s where your sales reps come in. The software works to collect data and information and deliver it to your sales team’s inbox so that they can close more at the end of the pipeline. Think of the software as a super-efficient team member that you assign the least appealing tasks so that your high-priority sales people can channel their much-needed pep into customer relationships and closing deals.
What’s the key difference between each sales platform?
Recap at a glance:
Customer Relationship Management | Marketing Automation |
Primary focus is to track your customer’s buying data through each stage of their sales lifecycle to help your team track product success and qualify current and future leads. | Primary focus is to promote your brand by automatically marketing products to customers through multiple channels. |
Sales Engagement Platform | Sales Enablement Platform |
Primary focus is to improve customer engagement with your product on every channel and at each step of the buying process.. | Primary focus is to help your sales reps close more sales by giving them the tools they need to enhance customer satisfaction. |
The purpose of any software is to make life easier, and these platforms are no different. For best effect, these software platforms are used in tandem with one another – sales engagement sits atop CRM tech that you’re already using, automated marketing is set up to establish connections with the customers your data has flagged, etc.
To invest, or not to invest? That’s the question.
Honestly, in our humble opinion…? You need to invest in a winning sales tech stack to give your team the tools they need to compete in today’s digital marketing and sales landscape.
The question is now “which software should you choose?”
Consider which software companies have data built into their software and the team behind their platform – do they have years of experience or are they new to the sales world? And, which companies are capable of giving you access to as many services as possible without requiring you to win the lottery to afford them. Look for competitive onboarding services that will set you up to success and help you customize the software to the unique performance needs of your team.
The benefits of a winning tech stack to grow your business
You need software that takes each element of the sales cycle into consideration for the absolute best sales results. Instead of bogging your employees down with more work, give them the tools they need to close those deals for you.
At Hyperio, we use professionally developed software to help you reach your internal sales goals. Our software identifies which targets to work with and when to target them with real-time event-based marketing intelligence.
Hyperio was built from the ground up to automate as much of the preparation, operations and analytics that weigh down sales teams. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, Hyperio leverages multiple data points to bring exciting account prospects to the forefront of your sequence and identify personalized contact insights to win the sale.
In other words – we save you time, stress, and money so your team can focus on closing deals to reach the next level of growth and funding for your business!
Don’t take our word for it – book your appointment in our calendar today and request a personalized demo and a 30 day FREE trial.
