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Have Success with Your Sales Technology Selection in 2022

Reevaluate Your Sales Technology Selection Process in 2022

Why Technology Matters, and How to Have Success with Your Selection Process

With the start of a new year, it’s a great time to reassess your sales technology stack and the strategy for how you go about selecting your sales technology solutions. Here’s a breakdown of why that matters and some key points when leveraging your tech stack to enable your sales professionals to close more deals in 2022…and beyond.

Why Do I Need a Sales Technology Selection Process?

Most organizations only think about adding a sales tool to their tech stack when they have a problem. They identify an issue they’re having, and then they seek out a technology solution to address it. It seems like a logical approach, but it’s actually a reactionary cycle that sets organizations up for poor adoption, low return on investment, and diminished results.

Sales tech is a powerful tool meant to increase the effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity of your sales process, sales teams, and sales leaders. That means getting this right will have a significant effect on your bottom line.

This manifests in several ways:

  • Less wasted money on technology licenses that sit unused or underused. (This report found an average of $259 worth of unnecessary software on every single US and UK office computer.)
  • More time for your sales reps to spend on revenue-generating activities and less time spent on tedious tasks.
  • Better customer engagement and prospect experience, which translates to more closed deals for your sales team

Selecting your sales technologies effectively with strategy and thought is becoming more important with every passing year. The sales technology landscape is overcrowded and highly complex, and more vendors are constantly coming onto the scene.

If you don’t have a systematic approach driven by data when you choose technology, you’re going to be overwhelmed, and you aren’t likely to see the best possible return on your investment.

If you’re looking to set (and to reach) ambitious goals with your company and sales organizations in 2022, now is the time to reassess how you enable your sales reps, and sales management and what tools, people, processes, content, and systems are going to make the most out of sales opportunities.

"If you don’t have a systematic approach driven by data when you choose technology, you’re going to be overwhelmed, and you aren’t likely to see the best possible return on your investment."

4 Ways to Maximize Your Sales Technology ROI

If technology tools can have this transformative effect on your organization, how do you actually have financial success with your selection of these powerful tools?

Choosing the right focus

The huge amount of sales tech tools for businesses can easily deviate from core business requirements and fall into these vast options. Leaders need to identify the major areas to concentrate on and how to achieve their objectives.

  1. Ask Yourself Hard Questions about Your Organization

One of the most challenging aspects of creating and implementing business strategies is how difficult it can be to maintain objectivity. When you’re thinking about your own company, it’s hard to be ruthlessly honest

For success with your sales technology, though, you need to ask yourself the potentially uncomfortable questions.

  • Is your technology working for you today?
  • Are your departments aligned, or are they siloed?
  • Do you have a strategy for technology selection that aligns to your overall business strategy, as well as your sales cycle and process?
  •  Are you seeing low or poor adoption of your existing sales technology? If so, why?
  •  Are you tracking your adoption and other metrics in order to get a clear sense of your current ROI?
  • What tools does your company currently use (and plan to continue using)? Are you using integration tools?

When companies ask these pointed questions and think about their sales stack from a strategic standpoint, many start to realize there is a lot of room for improvement. The beginning of 2022 is the perfect time to reassess your efforts and to implement a plan for greater success with your sales software.

  1. Implement a Thorough Auditing Process

Before you even think about selecting sales tech for your sales stack, make sure you’ve conducted thorough audits of the following:

  • Your stakeholders.
  • Your business goals and objectives.
  • Your gaps (in technology, people, processes, and systems).
  • Your overlap in existing sales technology functionality.
  • Your capabilities.

These audits are crucial because they give you an accurate picture of where your organization is today. Knowing where you stand allows you to better plot a course to where you want to go.

Talking to your stakeholders is arguably the most important aspect of the entire auditing process. These are your target audience, the people who are actually going to be using the sales technology on a day-to-day basis, and it’s imperative they are involved in the conversation.

  1. Why are Stakeholders so Important?

  • Your stakeholders know better than anyone what they need, where their challenges are, and what the customer wants. Not speaking to them means you’re ignoring your greatest source of insight and information.
  • Involving your stakeholders in the conversation (initially and on an ongoing basis) makes them feel more committed, more invested, and more heard.

Invested stakeholders are more likely to adopt a new sales technology. To drive growth ypu need a well defined sales technology auditing process

Develop a Plan

  1. Create a Strategy for Sales Technology Selection

After your audits, you will have a thorough and accurate base of information about your organization. At this point, you’re ready to start creating a sales technology selection strategy. This systematic approach will help you identify the following:

  • Your most pressing priorities.
  •  Your business goals and objectives.
  • Your overall business strategy.
  •  Your overall sales process and sales strategy.
  •  Your needs, challenges, and obstacles.

With all this information in clear focus, you can start thinking about what sales technology vendors best align to these things and can help you drive growth. Remember, every potential solution must be viewed with a revenue mindset. 

Scalability is important because you need solutions that can grow with you. The goal with sales tech is to generate more revenue, land more clients, and expand operations. You need solutions that are going to facilitate that growth and work with your organization once it happens.

Have Success with Your Sales Technology Selection in 2022

There are plenty of fish (I mean sales tools) In The Sea

The landscape contains numerous tools. These technologies could make your business more attractive, but the sheer variety of possibilities can be overwhelming.

And yeah, it goes beyond CRM software

A CRM is a must-have in terms of sales technology and pipeline management. Sales Enablement tools, lead generation tools, reporting tools, productivity tools, automation tools, and other sales tools can be powerful parts of your tech stack and provide a competitive advantage, qualify leads, automate manual tasks, increase productivity, enhance sales productivity, and drive revenue growth.

Sales Technology Vendor Engagement

Once you’ve asked yourself hard questions, fixed underlying organizational issues, gathered all the necessary information (about your current state and where you want to go), and created a thoughtful sales technology selection strategy, you’re ready to choose the right technology. Identify and to engage with a short list of potential sales tech vendors.

When engaging with vendors, keep all the information you gathered previously in mind. Ask yourself these questions:

  • Which vendors will address your biggest priorities and help you overcome your biggest challenges?
  • Which will yield the highest overall return on investment? For example, which vendors offer functionality that allows you to eliminate other paid licenses?
  • Which would be most attractive to your stakeholders, sales team, and sales leaders? Which ones will address their biggest needs, challenges, and barriers to success?
  • Which vendors can scale with your organization?

Need help selecting the right tools for your sales teams?

Choosing the right b2b sales tools for your reps can be a tedious task and take up valuable time. Need a helping hand identifying a short list of technologies that support modern sales teams? Our sales technology selector tool can help you get started.