4 Painfully Wide Gaps in the Sales Technology Space

A major issue facing technology buyers today is Sales and Martech overload. As organizations acquire more and more sales and marketing technology, employees are becoming overwhelmed with the number of resources they have to introduce and manage into their daily activities. 

Ideally, we believe that many existing, as well as emerging technology vendors, could really stand out by offering a greater number of unified solutions. This would involve consolidating multiple sales and marketing technologies into a single platform, which would inevitably save time and boost productivity. 

The idea of unified solutions is growing quickly as vendors are adding features like artificial intelligence to make their platforms more effective and responsive. With the integration of these types of resources, formerly segregated by individual technologies in separate departments, we now can offer insights that add increased value and ROI to the entire organization.

Start at the top

Marketing is increasingly collecting leads and valuable insights from multiple sources, but more leads don’t create more business without the right technology in place. Sales and marketing are experiencing inefficiencies by using multiple technology platforms that are not integrated and don’t have the ability to surface insights and opportunities to the right people quickly and efficiently. 

Vendors, let’s start at the top of the funnel and truly automate lead generation. What are our prospects and clients doing? How are they interacting with 3rd party websites, and our own marketing content?

Vendors, help us understand the buyers’ intent signals from multiple sources, including our own content, our website, as well as a third-party site that our prospects visit. Once we have collected these buyers’ insights, align it all with our client or prospects accounts within our CRM and surface it as a lead or for awareness to the appropriate representative. 

Having an ability to turn valuable insights into actions without having to spend our time researching allows our sales teams to focus more time on revenue-generating activities.

Continuing on the buyers’ journey

Now that we have done a great job identifying a new prospect or a new opportunity with an existing client let’s make sure their customer journey continues to be successful. This begins with an understanding of what the prospect has consumed and how that influenced them.

Vendors, our buyers have already identified with certain content, features, and benefits that align with their needs, using AI and machine learning, help us keep our sellers on track without having to access a secondary platform whilst staying within their workflow. What content was viewed and for how long? What makes this prospect unique? How can I personalize my messaging with this prospect? What was interesting to the prospect and what was not? By integrating these types of insights into our seller’s workflow, instead of asking them to work through secondary systems we are better served to keep them on message and aligned with the buyers’ needs through a single platform.

Close, Rinse, Wash and Repeat

A single resource that can be used to generate faster quotes, turn around proposals quickly (CPQ), facilitate contract signatures anywhere (eSignature) whilst doing it all within a mobile-first strategy is still evolving, but potentially a very important resource for an organization that has a large field-based sales team and account base.

Technology vendors have come a long way in this space but must continue to help us break the chains of the office and seamlessly navigate pricing, the development of a proposal and get the final signature on a contract all from a tablet or other mobile device.

Conclusion

How we integrate unified technology into our sales team’s workflows has never been so important. Almost all sales professionals agree that sales technology is an essential resource in their ability to identify and close deals, but the most successful also value the importance of a relationship and how that could be impacted by too much technology.

Moving away from singular or siloed solutions that do not align technology resources between stakeholders is more than a good idea. The continued consolidation and unification of technology within our workflows will improve ROI and the overall efficiency within the sales cycle. Inevitably reducing the overall number of individual technologies in use.