For sales leaders, investment in B2B sales software is no longer an option; it’s a competitive necessity. Compared to the pre-pandemic B2B environment, the functionality considered ‘nice to have’ is now regarded as essential. An effective sales tech stack will enhance all areas of your sales performance, allowing you to monitor high-value leads, automate your outreach, maximize your team’s productivity, exceed quotas and much more.
But, in a marketplace with so many options, how do you select the right B2B sales tech for your company’s sales and growth strategy? We’ve identified some of the critical categories and tools to consider when refining your sales stack.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
As you will know, your CRM is an integral B2B sales software when it comes to managing and uplifting the strategies used by your company to interact with existing and prospective customers. As your organization grows, ask yourself these questions:
- What customer information is needed for your sales processes?
- How important is customer retention to your business?
- Does your current CRM fail to meet your company’s requirements?
- If so, exactly which areas require improvement?
Here are our recommendations for scalable, integrable CRMs.
Salesforce
Salesforce helps businesses of all sizes accelerate sales by automating tasks, such as lead and contract management, sales opportunity management, and workflow automation.
HubSpot
A CRM with many features across various package types to select depending on your needs, such as Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, etc.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Highly integrable service with solutions for finance, HR, operations, and commerce, too.
Critical success considerations
- For many CRMs offering a marketplace of plugins or extra functionality, it’s essential to consider the extra cost. Salesforce, for example, has many useful plugins at an additional cost.
- Enterprise CRM solutions can be billed per user. Therefore, it’s crucial to consider the cost of seat expansion should you require it.
- Most CRMs will require manual customization to be the most effective. However, this can create onboarding complications for large companies to maintain and optimize.
Prospecting
Keeping your sales funnel full and engaged is vital in growing your business. For this, it’s crucial to have actionable leads in both quality and quantity. In addition, it’s also imperative to have compliant data to fuel your sales activities and drive more revenue into your business in a landscape of increasing digital privacy.
To streamline this process, here are our recommendations for prospecting B2B sales software.
Cognism
Allows you to pull specialized contacts from a database of 15 million companies, 400 million business profiles, and 7000 intent topics.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Target the right buyers, understand key insights, and engage with personalized prospecting and outreach on LinkedIn.
Lusha
A prospecting platform focused on delivering high-accuracy contacts from 100 million business profiles and 15 million company profiles.
Critical success considerations
- There are likely to be inaccuracies in the data with any prospecting tool, such as out-of-date contact details.
- Many prospecting services lack in-depth filtering options. Therefore, in some instances, you’ll acquire contacts that aren’t relevant to your business operations.
Sales Engagement
The interactions between sales representatives and customers, both existing and prospective, are crucial to measure and optimize in improving sales performance. As a result, sales engagement technology has increasingly become a high priority for many organizations. In fact, 90% of sales leaders plan to invest in B2B sales software that will assist their sales teams in effectively engaging prospects and customers.
Here are our recommendations for integrated sales engagement platforms that can help increase productivity, effectiveness and generate more sales opportunities.
Salesloft
Provides a plethora of engagement opportunities and metrics through the entire customer journey.
Outreach
Provides sales automation, conversation intelligence, buyer sentiment analysis, and team performance reporting.
Groove
A more customer-service-focused engagement platform that benefits relationship-based sellers.
Critical success considerations
- Effective use of sales engagement software is dependant on marketing-created content. Therefore, for the best ROI on engagement tools, tight alignment with marketing teams is needed.
- Similarly, a sales engagement strategy is highly benefited by an optimized sales enablement strategy.
Website Visitor identification
Assessing the effectiveness of your operations is highly critical to improving your processes and growing your company. For example, in sales, identifying your customers and gaining insight into their behavior is vital to understanding their needs and offering a bespoke solution.
Website visitor identification B2B sales software is an excellent way to do that, providing a wealth of information about your prospects and customers that would otherwise be hidden from you. Lead Forensics is intelligent reverse-IP tracking software, allowing users to identify their website visitors and uplift sales processes.
Main features
- Identifies the companies visiting your website, near-instantly providing you with the name of the company, the names of positions, the email addresses of key decision-makers, the company location, their website, and their telephone number.
- Provides in-depth metrics on their behavior, such as what they have searched for, how many times they have visited, which pages they have viewed and the time spent on each.
- Automated prompts on the activity of high-value leads that can be defined by customizable criteria, allowing your sales team to focus their efforts on ideal customer profiles (ICPs).
- Actionable insight into page engagement and abandonment provides visibility on how your on-site communications resonate with your prospects.
Critical success considerations
- Requires a proficient sales team to follow up and convert leads. Similarly, the automated prompts on your ICPs’ activity require careful, manual configuration and depend on reactive efforts from your sales team to maximize their effectiveness.
- To get the most value from specific features, the software will require historical data to draw on.
Summary
A tech stack should always be a refined answer to a well-defined problem. When refining a tech stack, every organization needs to closely consider their requirements against any solution they decide to explore. In addition, it’s crucial to invest in solutions that integrate, resulting in a seamlessly connected tech stack to uplift your sales processes.
Lead Forensics cuts out the noise to deliver insight to B2B organizations – precisely where and when required. Our software is a world-class business growth enabler, assisting sales teams to become more efficient and effective, capitalizing on every website opportunity in real-time.
