Successful Enterprise & Midmarket Sales Tech Selection
The Best Enterprise Sales Tech Selection Process
How Top Enterprise and Midmarket Companies Effectively Select Sales Tech
Whether you’re an enterprise company or a midmarket organization, having a sound, strategic, systematic sales technology selection process is hugely important. Optimizing your sales tech selection approach matters. Depending on your size and vertical, it could even mean the difference between millions in extra revenue and a tech stack that just drains your resources and time. Learn the process for selecting an effective, profitable sales tech stack.
8 Key Considerations for Your Enterprise Sales Tech Selection Process
1. Before Selecting Sales Tech, Lay the Groundwork for Success
Before you even think about picking an actual sales technology solution, there are two vital steps you need to complete first.
One, you must perform thorough audits. This includes your:
- Stakeholders
- Existing sales technology stack
- Capabilities
- Sales tech overlap
- Existing gaps
(Learn more about the sales technology auditing process here.)
The second step is creating a sales technology strategy. This is where you think holistically about your company. Consider how sales technology should fit into your overall sales strategy, and ensure there’s alignment between your people, processes, sales technology, and content.
The important takeaway when creating a sales tech strategy is to think beyond the tech itself. This exercise should address high-level issues within the organization related to processes, procedures, and systems. After all, if your processes are bad, sales tech will only help you do ineffective things more efficiently.
To read more about creating a sales technology strategy, read here.
"Consider how sales technology should fit into your overall sales strategy, and ensure there’s alignment between your people, processes, sales technology, and content."
2. Define Your Stakeholders
One key to success with your sales tech selection is to keep your stakeholders top of mind. (Note: if you’ve gone through the auditing process, you’ll have all the information you need to properly identify those stakeholders.)
Think about who is actually going to be using this sales technology. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for poor adoption, misuse of sales tech, and a poor to negative return on investment.
3. Define Your Capabilities, Infrastructure, and Most Pressing Needs
Sales technology should always be judged through the lens of revenue. If it’s not moving your revenue needle—or leading to ancillary activities that ultimately accomplish this—it’s not worth the investment. Sales technology should be there to help you maximize your efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, and revenue.
That’s why defining your most pressing needs is a key starting point. Determine where your biggest pain points are and what problems you can solve to yield the biggest financial results. Starting there allows you to make significant gains, which facilitates effective, sustainable scaling.
Make sure you’ve also properly defined your capabilities and infrastructure to ensure you can use a given sales technology solution to its most effective.
4. Ensure Alignment between Sales Technology and Your Strategy and Processes
Before engaging with a vendor, make sure that solution aligns to your existing overall sales strategy and processes. If it doesn’t, you likely won’t get the most out of that tool.
This is where needless (and expensive) sales technology churn happens. A tool is selected to solve a problem. It isn’t as effective as the company hoped. It’s discarded for a new solution. Then the whole cycle repeats.
Ensuring any new sales tech solution fits into your holistic sales strategy leaves less room for misused, underused, or not used tools.
5. Be Strategic with Your Sales Technology Selections
The most significant takeaway here is that a company should not be reactionary when it comes to selecting sales technology. That leads to everything from poor adoption rates to solutions that take more time than they save to a lack of provided training on the new solution.
To see the greatest return on your sales tech investment, be deliberate. Think holistically. Drive toward a systematic, strategic approach.
If you have poor systems and processes in place, no amount of sales technology is going to solve your problems. If you have a bad golf swing, a high-quality driver is just going to help you slice into the woods faster! Fix the underlying issues with purpose and strategy, and the sales technology will start to yield more impressive, significant results.
6. Find Scalable Sales Technology Solutions
When it comes to sales tech, one important goal is for your solutions to drive many years of growth. You want tools that can scale with you and your organization as profits increase and programs expand.
It can greatly reduce the efficiency and return on your investment if you have to abandon your sales tech stack and start over every time your organization reaches another threshold of growth.
Solutions with a tiered pricing structure offer a convenient and surefire way of knowing the solution can expand or reduce with your changing needs.
7. Identify Sales Technology Solutions That Drive ROI
Every sales tech solution must be judged against revenue or benefits that directly relate back to revenue. A sales technology tool is there to increase the efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of your sales team. If it’s not doing that, it’s not doing its job. Any solution that doesn’t move your revenue needle in a positive direction shouldn’t have a place in your sales tech stack.
Don’t limit your thinking, though, to closed deals alone. Revenue can be generated in lots of ways, and it’s not always as clear as a new client or a repeat purchase. As one example, consider sales rep churn. Maybe a tool helps your sale team land more deals, but it doesn’t integrate well with other sales tech solutions. It requires a tremendous amount of time-consuming manual work to input data. In that case, you could be hurting sales rep morale and even leading to a higher churn rate—all of which could lead that solution to a net loss.
Think about every solution in this holistic dollars-and-cents manner.
8. Know When to Turn to a Third-Party Perspective
The sales tech landscape is incredibly complex. There are hundreds of options within just about every subcategory of solution. And it’s not getting easier. Every year, more solutions are added, and it becomes more crowded, sophisticated, and overwhelming.
With the stakes so high, it’s important not to live in a vacuum. Know when to turn to a specialist, analyst, or consultant. Working with a third party provides numerous benefits:
- Getting your sales technology right can have a revolutionary effect on your revenue generation and growth. For an enterprise or midmarket company, it’s not unheard of for sales technology to affect your annual bottom line in the millions. In this case, the right consultant can offer an incredible return on your investment.
- A consultant serves as a sounding board to help you navigate this complex sales tech landscape.
- A consultant provides the insight and knowledge to marry your needs, strategies, and processes with viable sales tech solutions.
- A knowledgeable consultant can give you a good understanding of everything that’s available in the market today. For example, maybe there’s a solution that’s perfectly suited to your organization, but you’re not even aware it exists. This kind of industry knowledge can be invaluable.
- Sites that just compare sales tech solutions are helpful for surface-level research, but a consultant can get a better understanding of your company specifically and provide insight and resources into what solutions would be a profitable, smart fit.
- The right consultants will take you through every step of a systematic, strategic process. They will ensure you’re doing what needs to be done not only in selecting the right sales tech but in addressing any underlying process-, system-, or strategy-level issues within the organization that could hinder the sales tech solution.