Sales enablement

Building Your Perfect Sales Tech Stack in 2023

The CloudShare Team

Jun 13, 2023 - 4 min read

Whether for customer success or sales enablement, your tech stack is crucial. Without the right tools and technology, your sales team won’t be able to keep up with their competitors. For you, that means lower revenue, fewer sales, and potentially lower overall customer satisfaction.

To avoid falling down that particular rabbit hole, you need to deploy the perfect sales software stack for your needs. That starts with understanding exactly what that means.

What is a Sales Tech Stack?

An organization’s sales tech stack encompasses all technology it uses to optimize its sales cycle, support its sales team, and improve customer outcomes. Most sales stack tools are software-based, taking the form of either standalone applications or dedicated sales platforms. The use cases of a typical sales tech stack include:

• Automating manual tasks.
• Streamlining lead management.
• Improving communication.
• Improving personalization and targeting.
• Tracking sales performance.
• Enhancing productivity.
• Supporting proof of concept demonstrations.
• Customer onboarding.

The Benefits of an Effective Sales Tech Stack

Failure to invest in your sales tech stack can have dire consequences. By that same vein, a tech stack purpose-built to meet your organization’s needs comes hand-in-hand with many benefits. These include:

• Fewer communication and data silos between teams and departments.
• Improved customer satisfaction.
• Actionable insights that allow your organization to make direct improvements to your sales efforts.
• A consistent customer experience.
• More effective product demonstrations.
• A shorter sales cycle.
• More comprehensive insights about customers and their needs.
• Higher sales performance.
• Increased revenue.
• Improved workplace culture.

Key Components of a Sales Technology Stack

While it varies by organization and industry, a typical SaaS sales stack should generally consist of the following:

1. Customer Relationship Management. A CRM tool is essential not just for your sales team, but also for marketing and customer success. By establishing a single source of truth for customer data and tracking customers at every touchpoint of their journey, your team can provide a far better experience overall.
2. Product Demos. Every good sales stack should support tailored, interactive product demonstrations — both for the sake of better pitches to prospects and for customer onboarding purposes.
3. Engagement and Outreach. Features such as email tracking, sales call recording, automated email flows, content management, and social marketing help keep the sales cycle moving along like a well-oiled machine.
4. Analytics and Reporting. Sales is ultimately a data-driven profession. Analytics and reporting tools allow your organization to not only improve the performance of individual salespeople, but also track and optimize the entirety of its sales cycle.
5. Lead Generation and Management. This is a fairly broad umbrella, encompassing all tools that allow an organization to find, identify, track, and categorize its leads.
6. Sales Enablement. Sales enablement tools help salespeople improve the customer experience, streamline the sales cycle, and increase their wins.
7. Automation. This category is somewhat self-explanatory — the sales process is rife with unnecessary manual tasks. A big part of improving your sales cycle is to identify and automate those tasks, freeing your salespeople to focus on securing leads and closing deals.
8. Communication and Collaboration. Internal collaboration tools include scheduling and meeting software, email clients, instant messaging, and project management.

How to Build a Sales Tech Stack

1. First, know yourself. Factors to consider include the size of your business, the nature of your industry and niche, your products and services, and your target audience. Speak to stakeholders not just in sales, but in every department that interacts with your organization’s sales pipeline.
2. Determine your needs and pain points. Look at your existing sales pipeline. Where do you seem to lose the most prospects? Where do your salespeople tend to struggle?
3. Assess your existing tools. Chances are you’ve already got at least a few tools present in your tech stack. Consider whether these tools are worth keeping and integrating, or if you’d prefer to replace them entirely.
4. Consider the future. You know what you need at the moment — but what about as your business begins to grow? How might your requirements change, and what will you need in order to address those changes?
5. Create a list of critical features. With a clear idea of your present and future needs in mind, define the features and functions your sales tech stack absolutely needs to possess. This should generally be done on a team-by-team basis, as different teams will have different needs.
6. Create a deployment roadmap. It’s inadvisable to roll out a completely new tech stack without warning. Instead, consider how the rollout of each new tool will impact the different teams that will be using it.
7. Prepare for training. Even the simplest tools have a slight learning curve. You’ll need to account for this, and ensure you’ve a plan in place to train your people on new additions to your stack.
8. Execute your plans. With everything else in place, there’s just one thing left to do — start building. Just remember as you do that this is an iterative, ongoing process. There’s always something you can do better, and there are always ways you can improve.

How Your Sales Stack Enables a Better Customer Experience

One of the most important goals of sales enablement is to ensure the customer journey progresses as smoothly as possible. A big part of that is to ensure that the customer actually understands how your software works. The right customer training software allows you to not only provide them with that understanding, but also support hands-on proof of concept demonstrations.

How exactly do you know if you’ve chosen the right training software, though? More importantly, how do you ensure you implement it properly? We’ve put together a blog post that answers both questions.

By reading Best Practices for Customer Training Software in 2023, you’ll learn:

• The importance of investing in customer training.
• The difference between software training and standard training.
• How to ensure your customer training program does what it needs to do.