• What We Do
    ○
    • Sales Technology Consulting Services
      ○
      • Sales Technology Consulting Services
      • Stakeholder Analysis & Sales Technology Audit
      • Sales Technology Selection Strategy
      • Sales Technology Vendor Moderation
      • Sales Technology Adoption Program
      • Sales Technology ROI
      • Multiyear Sales Technology Strategy
    • Research/Advisory
      ○
      • About Clear View Reports
        ○
        • Outbound Prospecting / Agent Assisted
        • Sales Enablement / Content Management
        • Sales Skills Development and Reinforcement
        • Sales Technology and Training Selector
  • Sales Tech Selection Resources
    ○
    • Certified Sales Technology Landscape
    • Tools and Guides
      ○
      • Sales Tech Stack Selection Tool
      • Sales Technology Buying Roadmap
      • Sales Technology ROI Guide
    • Sales Training
      ○
      • Sales Training Solutions
      • Certified Sales Training Landscape
  • Learning Center
    ○
    • Sales Technology Blog
    • Podcasts
    • Webinars
  • About
    ○
    • Contact Us
    • Our Story
    • News & Press
  • Sales Technology Selection Tool
  • Book a Discovery Call
Vendor NeutralVendor Neutral
  • What We Do
    • Consulting
      • Stakeholder Analysis & Sales Technology Audit
      • Sales Technology Selection Strategy
      • Sales Technology Vendor Moderation
      • Sales Technology Adoption Program
      • Sales Technology ROI Framework
      • Multiyear Sales Technology Strategy
    • Research/Advisory
      • Certified Sales Technology Profiles
      • Certified Sales Training Reports
      • Analyst Research
        • Outbound Prospecting / Agent Assisted
        • Sales Enablement / Content Management
        • Sales Skills Development and Reinforcement
      • Sales Technology and Training Selection Tool
  • Sales Tech Selection Resources
    • Sales Technology Solutions
    • Tools and Guides
      • Sales Tech Stack Selection Tool
      • Sales Technology Buying Roadmap
      • Sales Tech ROI Guide
    • Certified Sales Technology Landscape
    • Sales Training
      • Sales Training Solutions
      • Sales Training Selection Tool
      • Certified Sales Training Landscape
  • Learning Center
    • Sales Tech Blog
    • Podcasts
    • Webinars
  • About
    • Contact Us
    • Our Story
    • News & Press

Sales Tech and Innovation Blog .

Industry Experts and Thought Leaders

Buying Sales Technology and Training is hard. We’re here to help with curated content from leading experts, thought leaders, and analysts.

Scroll Down

Buying Sales Technology | Harnessing the Power of 3

Today’s businesses have to be nimble. No matter the size or structure, companies have to shuck and jive fast. Making moves to ensure growth is more like guessing whether some new technology, or new flow will pan out to revenue. Well, there are some keys to the kingdom worth mentioning to salespeople and service providers everywhere that this article covers. All businesses have an umbrella that consists of three major components. CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software), MAP (Marketing Automation Platforms), and Sales Enablement tools are the backbone of most businesses today. This is especially true in the SaaS world, but even retailers, service providers, and consultants are beginning to see the light when it comes to buying sales technology and building a scalable techstack.

The Power of 3 When Buying Sales Technology

If we know that businesses rely on these powerhouse tools that help them measure, grow, sustain, and generate revenue, then it’s in our best interests as value creators to find and provide technologies that are complementary to these 3 cornerstone platforms. Let’s break down each one of these three and talk a bit about what they do and why they are important.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management software) is like your digital rolodex. However, these platforms, are more than just cards holding phone numbers. They house any and all things related to your prospects and customers. This includes but is not limited to accounts they are associated with, opportunities created, follow ups, events, and so on and so forth. This is the proverbial waterhole that sales professionals draw from today. Gone are the days of stalking house to house banging on doors to sell your service or product. Now, it’s a report we pull in our CRM. If you want to see all the leads in your CRM that were created last month that have not been contacted yet, who’s name starts with “A”, it’s merely a few clicks away and there you have it. All those people’s names, numbers, and email addresses are all there for you to leverage. CRM changed the way businesses go to Market.

It’s important to think about ways your tools, products and services compliment a CRM. This can be one specific CRM or multiple. The more then better, but many multi-million dollar companies exist that serve only users of one CRM. There are so many ways that CRM can be enhanced. Maybe your tools get data into the CRM, help track emails, or contracts. Maybe they create quotes, or auto-merge duplicate records,  plague on CRM. The bottom line herem, is that when selling in the SaaS space, complementing or enhancing a company’s chosen CRM is a good angle to take upon approach. These are costly tools and seeing a full ROI from them is often a big focus for firms utilizing a CRM.

MAP (Marketing Automation Platforms) are essential for scalable growth and sustaining a large customer base. There was once a time when it took eons for a company to make a change of any kind. Not because their people moved slowly. No.

The reason for the slow move to change is logistical. “How can we let all of our clients know this change is coming before we make the change?” Imagine stalking door to door, city by city, or sending one letter at a time to people informing them a change is coming to a service they already pay for. A single change to your products or services would take months, and in some cases years to roll out. You’d have to wait that long just to ensure your paying clients got the word. Then there was still no way of knowing how they feel about it. Until thy cancel, of course.

Today, MAP’s gives us the ability to reach out to a massive amount of customers and prospects at once. Informing them of changes, offering them special pricing or collateral to take action against. Here’s the drawback. When prospecting using Marketing automation as a delivery mechanism, everything traces back to the CRM. Without a strong communication bridge between CRM and MAP, chaos ensues! Duplicate records all over the place start popping up, triggers are going off and notifications are being sent to multiple people for the same lead. Too many sales reps begin reaching out to the same companies and no one is getting traction or meetings because the conduit that moves information from MAP to CRM is broken or nonexistent.

Think about all the ways your product or tools help solve the problems MAP’s cause, and you’ll find a buyer that has that exact problem. While they are powerful, MAP’s require constant maintenance, supervision, and editing to ensure they are delivering what needs to be delivered and not irritating potential buyers and existing customers. How does your product or service enhance or compliment MAP’s?

Finally, Sales Enablement takes the stage as the final piece of the Power 3. There are countless ways to look at sales enablement. These are platforms that do many things. They manage cadences, or sequences, they track email opens and link clicks, they make managing a pipeline easier in many ways. They even incorporate social touches which enables salespeople to become more personal with their platforms. Platforms are all the rage in sales today because they enable salespeople to have a better view of what’s happening with that prospect as they move through their pipeline.

What’s happening to those emails after you send them? How many times has this email been opened at this company and by how many people? Of the seven attempts to connect with this prospect, how many times have they actually picked up the phone or responded to my messaging? These questions (and more) can be answered with the use of sales enablement platforms.

How does your tool set benefit a sales team leveraging a sales enablement platform? If you can tie your product or service back to a platform that your prospects are already successful with, you have some great talking points and are quite able to be effective in moving the conversation forward.

In short, my submission is that sales pros everywhere should be finding ways to enhance or compliment one of the three major platforms most enterprise companies use today. Consultants should be out there educating SMB’s and startups to take a look at this Power 3 and consider how they will use them to grow into the giants they want to become. There’s no telling when the next change to this mashup will take place, so we should all be looking to familiarize with these cornerstone pieces of software before the current state becomes the past state and the next big SaaS change slaps us all in the face.

 

About the Author:

James Buckley is Director of Business Development and Partner Manager at JB Sales Training. He is a Sales Trainer, creator of the popular #saywhatsales and podcast host who inspires sales representatives to own their own brand. James writes and creates video content to inspire sales professionals to create unique personal brands. He’s also the author of “Tip of The Spear”, a handbook for new sales development reps that seek to get a strong start in the sales industry.”

April 8, 2021 Dan Cilley
  • Sales Tech Procurement for 2023: Trends and Strategy
    Sales Technology Procurement 2023: trends and strategy If there's one thing that's certain as we head into 2023, it's that little is. In a shock departure from...
  • How Company Culture Drives Sales Tech Stack Adoption
    How company culture drives sales tech stack impact and adoption Culture is the heart around which the lifeblood of the company courses. Research by Deloitte has...
  • Sales Technology and Organizational Resilience through sales tech strategy
    Enhance Organizational Resilience through Sales Tech Strategy Excellence After months of the sales tech sector being spent in a state of nervous apprehension, the good news...
  • AR and VR Feature Image
    AR and VR - harness innovation in the digital world for real-world impact on your organization Science fiction has often been the precursor to scientific reality Science...
  • CRM: the rights and wrongs and how to make them work for you
    CRMs: the rights and wrongs and how to make them work for you… A run-down of the problems we see as typical in CRM usage and...
  • Customer Experience powered Digital Transformation: why you need it, how to do it
    Customer Experience powered Digital Transformation: why you need it, how to do it The customer is king, right? Most organizations would say so. But how many...
  • 3 stage sales saas procurement test
    3 Stage Sales SaaS Procurement Readiness Test: Take It Now Things we know: SaaS companies are big and getting bigger. The fastest-growing SaaS companies grow their teams...
  • SAAS Mismanagement and the Unseen Impacts - Sarah Carey
    Employee Spotlight - Sarah Carey - Unseen Impacts of SaaS Mismanagement Attaining utopia with sales technology ... ...ecosystems isn’t an easy feat, whether it be trying to align...
  • SaaS Sustainability and Digital Waste: deal with it now, or face difficult questions about why you didn’t The carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and...
  • Triage Sales Tech Stress and Eliminate it
    Triage Sales Tech Stress and Eliminate It Insight, impact, growth: three times Vendor Neutral triaged organizations’ sales tech stress, and eliminated it. Cloud adoption grew by a...
  • 3 Red Flags to Failing Sales SAAS Ecosystems
    SaaS applications make up 70% of total company software use: if Sales SaaS fails to deliver, then so too does your business. But how do you...
  • Implement A Systems Approach
    Grow Revenue And Enhance The Customer Experience Through Digital Culture Transformation Digital transformation is not a new concept. Digital initiatives have been on the rise in...
  • We’re in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. Is your manufacturing business implementing digital transformation in the most effective way?
    Are You Ready for Industry 4.0? The Digital Transformation of Manufacturing According to many in the manufacturing industry, we are currently in the middle of the...
  • Top ERP Transformations That Support buyers
    Top ERP Transformations That Support Buyers B2B companies are currently up to their necks in "digital transformation." They're moving at a rapid clip to enhance the...
  • Increase-eCommerce-Adoption-by-including-your-Sales-Team
    eCommerce Adoption and Your Sales Team Internal Resistance Any type of change within an organization is likely to see some resistance. It’s not that change is necessarily...
Vendor Neutral Empowering Business Enabling Growth Logo with Tag line
  • 888-411-8908
  • info@vendorneutral.com
  • Book a Discovery Call
Instagram Linkedin Twitter Rss

Consulting

  • Stakeholder Analysis & Sales Technology Audit

Research

  • Certified Sales Technology Profiles
  • Certified Sales Training Reports
  • Clear View Reports

Information

  • About Us
  • News and Press
  • Contact Us

Sales Technology

  • Sales Technology Solutions
  • Sales Technology Selection Tools
  • Sales Technology Consulting Services
Sign up for our newsletter
  • Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Copyright © 2022 Vendor Neutral LLC. All Rights Reserved