While sales automation is critical to success in today’s highly digitized business realm, identifying the ideal sales technology solution is never easy. The plethora of sales tech solutions saturating the market today are enough to make one’s head spin. That is why Vendor Neutral was created. Our mission is to help business owners identify a sales technology and training solution that aligns with their objectives to facilitate organizational success. To achieve this, we don’t just recommend any solution that comes our way. We adhere to a strict Stack Framework, so each solution we recommend brings long term success to our clients. Here is how we evaluate solutions and approach our decision-making process.

1. Identify the Need and Alternative Solutions

A majority of sales technology and training solutions often fail because the reasons for implementation were not clear from the outset. For instance, the chances of failure are always high when a business deploys a sales technology solution because the competition is using it. Why? Well, what works for one business may not work for another due to operational and even goal differences.

Before the competition deployed that particular solution, they probably analyzed their needs and saw that it’d help them solve or improve a specific situation. That is why before we recommend any solution to our clients, we first conduct an exhaustive audit of your technology ecosystem, your goals, and desired outcomes to see if a particular tool aligns with your operations.

We know that some problems don’t always call for sophisticated technology. That is why part of our Stack Framework involves further analyzing a need to see if it can be solved without technology.  We look for loopholes or organizational adjustments that you could make to meet the identified need without incurring the cost or changes that come with implementing sales-tech solutions. If there are no alternatives, we take the step that follows below.

2. An Analysis of Interoperability

When a business incorporates a new sales-tech software, the goal is usually to not only improve sales processes. However, it’s important to note that changes that occur as a result of incorporating that software in one department could negatively impact another department, making the solution counterproductive. This often happens because the business did not consider the interrelated factors before implementation.

Part of our Stack Framework is to ensure every solution a client implements not only improves sales processes but also benefits the entire company, facilitating organizational success. In that light, once we identify there’s indeed a need for a sales-tech training solution in your organization, we don’t just give you the green light to deploy it. We evaluate the technology further by analyzing to gauge its interoperability. In other words, we try to determine how well it aligns with the existing technology in your organization or how well it will integrate with other tools you may want to implement in the future. This is done to ensure every technology you incorporate promotes cohesion and productivity across the entire organization, instead of negatively altering existing procedures in other departments.

3. Gauging Software and Organizational Flexibility

Technology is subject to change, and it evolves every day. This means a highly efficient sales technology now may not be relevant five years to come. At the same time, technology is expensive. So, when you implement a particular software to automate your sales processes, you want something that helps improve sales and marketing processes in the long run.

To ensure you get exactly that, we also assess the flexibility of every solution before we recommend it to our clients. We evaluate how configurable its automation and analytics tools are, and how easy it is to expand its data model if the need ever arises. However, note, a sales software solution might be flexible, but if your organization can’t accommodate the changes that occur in the long run, then its flexibility will be of no good use to you. That is why beyond evaluating the flexibility of a technology solution, we also gauge the adaptability of your enterprise to the requirements and changes that may occur a few years down the line when the solution evolves.

4. Conduct a Return on Investment Analysis

The goal of sales automation is to improve sales and marketing processes, while consequently minimizing overhead costs. So, when the costs of implementing and maintaining a sales technology solution are high, you will not have achieved this goal. That said, conducting a ROI analysis is a critical step in our solution evaluation and decision-making process. It helps us determine whether a particular solution will be worth your while. Our ROI analysis looks at;

• How much the system costs, i.e., how much the vendor charges for their solution before anything else.
• The hard costs, i.e., the equipment required for implementation
• The soft costs, i.e., how much it’ll cost to train your employees on how to use it?
• The cost of implementation on other areas of your business, i.e., will you need to stop other sales processes temporarily during installation? If so, how much profits will you lose during this period?

Once we consider those costs, we also try to evaluate the returns. For instance, how much profits will you need after implementation to recover the hard and soft costs, and how long it will take you to achieve these profits. Also, once implemented, what will be the monetary benefit? For example, will it help increase sales? Will it help you keep overhead costs down?

A ROI analysis is imperative as it’s the only way to answer such questions and determine if a particular sales technology solution will be a worthy investment.

5. Deliver a Vendor Neutral Solution Report

Our objective is to help you get the best solution while keeping costs on the low. That is why throughout the entire evaluation process, we compare solutions from about 400  vendors to identify one whose solution aligns with your priorities. Our process is transparent and unbiased, and at the end of our evaluation, we will give you well-detailed, unbiased data on each vendor whose solution we analyzed. We understand that time is of the essence, which is why, besides transparency, we deliver the results of our neutral vendor analysis in as little as 30 days.  Hit us up today to get started.