Sales leaders must make the right investments in sales technology if they want to help their sales teams win in 2022. The right sales tech stack can improve sales productivity and broaden rep participation by:

  • Automating administrative tasks for sellers and managers.
  • Collecting valuable customer and seller data.
  • Providing real-time coaching and recommendations.

But there are myriad sales tech solutions in the market. This leads to considerable buyer confusion and fatigue, making identifying the best sales tech a daunting endeavor. Sales leaders should identify the right sales tech investments by taking four simple steps:

Identify And Prioritize Your Biggest Pain Points

Building the right sales tech stack that can unleash your sales team’s potential should be a deliberate and well-thought-out process. It starts with identifying the biggest pain points for your sellers and your managers, followed by prioritizing which of those pain points to address based on:

  • What will have the biggest impact on your sales team’s productivity.
  • What can be solved quickly to impact 2022 results.

This role-based approach will help you understand if giving your managers visibility into how to best coach and improve your sellers is more or less important than addressing reps’ forecasting accuracy. Sales leaders must clearly understand the biggest problem(s) they want to solve that’ll significantly impact the organization in 2022 and prioritize addressing those.

Audit Your Existing Sales Tech Stack

The next step is to audit the existing revenue tech stack to identify what investments you’ve already made. Make sure that your organization has foundational systems, such as sales force automation and sales content management, in place before making investments in more advanced capabilities like conversation intelligence and forecasting, among others. Ensure you’re realizing the full benefit of those foundational investments before making new investments.

Assess whether you can leverage your existing tech solutions to solve the pain points identified in step one rather than making additional investments. As part of your audit, you should ensure existing sales tech solutions are integrated with marketing and customer success to create a revenue engine tech stack that can enable seamless end-to-end buyer journeys.

Audit And Fix Processes

Once you’ve audited your sales tech stack, you must fix broken processes before making additional tech investments. Buying technology will only accelerate poorly designed processes. Too often, sales leaders buy technology hoping that it’ll solve all their problems. In reality, the problems are often a result of something else, like poor processes.

Sales leaders should look for ways to offload, eliminate, outsource, and automate process bottlenecks such as data capture and email sequences. We outline the importance of putting foundational processes in place in our insight-driven sales system research, which you can find here.

Identify Vendors And A Make Selection

Once you’ve 1) prioritized the biggest pain points that you want to solve, 2) identified whether you have foundational systems in place, and 3) fixed processes that you want to automate, then you can look to evaluate vendors for a particular category and make a selection. My colleague Anthony McPartlin outlined some of the sales tech categories here.

When assessing these variables, sales leaders must look through a lens of buyer-centricity and seller friendliness. Will this technology make sellers more responsive and more valuable to clients? Will the technology help create a smooth, connected buyer journey? Additionally, the tech must be integrated to the entire revenue tech stack to realize its full potential.

Identifying The Best Sales Tech Can Be Daunting

Identifying, choosing, and implementing the best sales technology for your organization is daunting. Forrester is here to make sure sales executives and leaders are making the best sales tech decisions for their organizations. We’ve published research on the revenue tech stack and have much more on the horizon in 2022! Forrester Sales Executive and Sales Operations clients can check out our published vendor tech research below:

And Forrester Market Insights clients can access the Forrester Wave™ below: