Glossary

Sales Stack

Your sales team is ultimately only as good as the tools they’re given. Without access to the right sales technology and tools, they’ll be outpaced by your competitors. Building a modern sales stack for your SaaS company is crucial — here’s what that involves.  

What is a B2B Sales Stack? 

A sales stack encompasses every piece of technology used by your organization’s sales team. Particularly in light of the global shift towards hybrid work, the majority of tools in the sales tech stack are software-based. The complexity and scale of an organization’s sales stack is typically a reflection of its sales cycle.

Smaller businesses might be able to make do with a single customer relationship management platform. At the same time, larger organizations might leverage a comprehensive set of tools for sales discovery, enablement, and success. 

The Importance of Optimizing Your Sales Software Stack

The SaaS market is extremely competitive. Without a modern, optimized sales stack, your company will miss out on multiple opportunities for potential growth — and those opportunities will, in all likelihood, go to your competitors. An outdated sales stack can also slow down sales cycles, make it more difficult to analyze and understand customer behavior, and greatly increase your customer acquisition costs.

Consequently, with an optimized sales stack, your organization can: 

• Break down communication silos between departments and teams.
• Automate manual tasks, leaving sales personnel free to focus on customer engagement. 
• Improve targeting across the entire buyer journey. 
• Support a consistent and personalized customer experience, leading to greater customer satisfaction. 
• Streamline multiple stages of the sales cycle, including lead management, product demos, and onboarding. 
• Provide your team with actionable insights about customer behavior, preferences, and needs. 
• Improve sales performance and increase revenue by enabling team members to close more deals, identify more upsell opportunities, and attract and retain more leads. 

What Should Your Sales Stack Include?

Generally, every SaaS sales stack should include the following tools: 

• Virtual IT Labs, allowing your business to support interactive customer onboarding and more engaging product demos. 

• Engagement and outreach software, including:
  • List building
  • Email tracking and automation
  • Content management
  • Social marketing
  • Content syndication. 
  • Personalization and segmentation for each major sales channel. 
• A customer relationship management platform to help your organization establish a single source of truth for all customer data.  
• Analytics and reporting tools that monitor not only customer behavior but also the performance of each salesperson. 
• Sales forecasting tools that leverage predictive analytics to help your company prepare for market disruptions or shifts. 
• Lead management, generation, and prioritization. 
• Pipeline management. 
• Automation. The more manual work you can safely eliminate from your sales process, the better. 
• Internal communication and collaboration tools such as: 
  • Scheduling/calendar software
  • Video conferencing
  • Instant messaging
  • Project management
• A means of supporting integration between tools and platforms.
• A digital sales room to help create a more cohesive buying journey. 
• Tools for managing proposals and product demonstrations.
• User feedback mediums such as surveys and reviews.
• Search engine optimization software. 
• A learning management system to help your organization deliver more effective training, onboarding, and education. 

Other Sales Technology Considerations

When building a sales technology stack, you need to consider your business. 

What industry and niche does your software serve? Who is your target audience, how large is your business, and what do your prospects look like? More importantly, what are the needs and pain points of your sales team? 

You should also assess your existing stack — you’re likely already using a few sales tools. Do they serve your current needs? Will they scale effectively with your business? 

Finally, identify any feature or functionality gaps in your existing sales stack. From there, you can begin looking for vendors that fit your needs. Just make sure you also create a realistic deployment roadmap that leaves enough time for training and integration. 

To learn more about sales technology and sales enablement, book a free demo with CloudShare.