What is Sales Technology?

Much of a salesperson's day is tied up with non-revenue-generating activities — manual tasks such as data entry, scheduling, and research. It's not optimal for business, and it's also tedious for the seller. Salesforce's State of Sales report found that the amount of time spent selling dropped as low as 28%, down from 34% in 2018. That's a trend in the wrong direction.

With so much time spent on non-selling tasks, sales software & technology is more important than ever. But what sales technologies are available, and how do you know what works for your sales team? Let's take a closer look.

Sales technology refers to the tools, software, and platforms used by sales teams to streamline and optimize their sales processes, track interactions, and analyze prospect or customer data for the best chance at making a sale. Sales tech includes customer relationship management (CRM) systems, sales automation software, analytics tools, and communication platforms — all aimed at enhancing sales efficiency, effectiveness, and driving revenue growth.

A sales tech stack consists of all the sales software that a sales organization uses to support the sales cycle. With one or more sales tech tools in place, you effectively create a sales tech stack. Some sales tech tools may address specific parts of the sales funnel while other software, such as a CRM, serve as the underlying foundation.

A sales tech stack is one component of a company's overall tech stack, which is made up of all the digital tools and software a company relies on to do business.

Sales technology improves sales process efficiency and provides accuracy around record-keeping and analysis. For example, some technology allows sellers to easily see when they last spoke to a prospect, how the prospect interacted with the company's website, or whether they had a customer service interaction. This insight significantly lightens the mental load on sellers so that they can focus on what matters most: listening to the prospect, their needs, and more effectively positioning the solution you offer.

Sales technology helps create a better overall experience: for your sellers, your customers, and the business. How? It starts by enabling sellers, so they are more confident as they approach each interaction. Sales technology helps to:

• Reduce the burden of accurately tracking conversations, schedules, and details across hundreds or even thousands of leads
• Provide insights that help sellers better understand prospects and customers — importantly, which leads are the most qualified or when it might be the best time to contact them
• Simplify workflows and shorten prospecting timeframes, so sellers can better architect their time each day and spend more time closing deals and meeting quotas
• Improve job satisfaction by automating tedious and repetitive work so their energy and focus is where it should be — on the customer

The combination of sales tech and artificial intelligence can further amplify these benefits. Salesforce's State of Sales report found that only one-third of sales organizations are currently using AI, but a focus on efficiency stands to significantly raise that number over the coming years.

Here are five common types of tools or software that can help optimize specific parts of the sales cycle:

1. CRM software: A given for almost all sales organizations, CRMs are a valuable tool for helping reps manage customer interactions and tasks throughout the sales process. CRMs do more than store information — they unify access to a comprehensive view of customer data that includes website activity, calls, emails, chats, and more. Anyone in marketing, sales, or customer service, for example, can access the same customer record.
2. Sales prospecting and lead enrichment software: Sales prospecting tools help sales teams find and qualify leads. They typically gather information about visitors to your website and social media accounts and highlight engaged leads — along with their contact information. This makes building a prospect list much faster. Many tools use AI to further speed the process and tailor your list to your target demographic or ideal customer profile (ICP).
   
   That said, prospecting lists aren't always perfect, which is where lead management and enrichment tools come in. Perhaps a lead engages with your website but provides a generic email address or wrong phone number. Lead enrichment software crawls the web or other data sources to find identifying information and contact details, such as someone's job title. These tools help reveal a prospect's role (and whether they're in a position to purchase) along with key account-based details around size, revenue, funding, and more. They can also help with lead scoring and routing.
3. Sales training and enablement software: This technology provides a centralized space for marketing teams to store and organize sales content and collateral. Sellers don't have time to search company wikis or blogs for relevant educational materials and customer evidence. Instead, they need a single (and searchable) source of truth for the content their prospects want most.
4. Revenue intelligence (RI) technology: Revenue intelligence surfaces opportunities while measuring progress toward target metrics, often visualizing sales pipeline and forecast trends as well as team performance. RI platforms use AI or machine learning to analyze data across multiple sources, make predictions, and provide enhanced analytics and real-time insights into buyer interactions, needs, and intent.
5. Sales reporting, forecasting or analytics software: These tools use data from your CRM to help understand where your team is succeeding or struggling and forecast against actual performance (rather than potential). This software enables sales leaders to make data-driven decisions and confidently adjust strategy, resource allocation, or budgeting.

According to Harvard Business Review, Generative AI is poised to revolutionize sales . But AI, whether generative or predictive, is already delivering change.

• Predictive AI can surface predictions about what's going to happen with deals and, more broadly, across the sales organization. This insight guides sellers and sales leaders to adjust strategies and hit their targets.
• Generative AI helps craft communication, call summaries, scripts, and presentations — saving reps time while ensuring that an interaction is tailored to a prospect's unique need.

The most dramatic developments in AI for sales that I've experienced involve content generation and conversational bots, which can help provide service answers to routine questions. With generative AI, sellers can quickly craft meaningful messages to clients that include data from their CRM system and past email communications. In fact, Salesforce's Trends in Generative AI Report found that 58% of salespeople report that generative AI helps or will help them increase productivity. Even better, 61% say that it helps or will help them better serve customers.

As AI advances, it will become even more effective at making recommendations, providing personalized advice, offering a next best action, and classifying data. There is strong potential for AI to begin guiding reps with next steps — whether that's the best opportunity, who to call, or what to do. I know it goes without saying, but it's true: The more that can be automated, the more time sellers have to sell and focus on the nuances of the human interaction.

More to the benefit of the overall business, AI also helps with data security, as it can rapidly detect unusual activity and patterns within data. Additionally, predictive analytics help pave the way for preemptive actions.

Your sales tech stack may also include calendaring or more general project management tools that simplify a salesperson's day. Either way, these critical tasks are more time-consuming and prone to human error without the aid of technology:

• Prospecting and customer research
• Calendaring and call and/or email automation
• Data entry into multiple systems or spreadsheets
• Lead generation, management, and scoring tasks
• Generating quotes or proposals
• Manually tracking or auditing internal sales performance
• Analyzing data for insights into performance, forecasting, or revenue implications

The key to introducing sales technology is to evaluate tools based on the needs of your sales team and business needs. Will it solve critical pain points? Do you know which tasks are dominating a seller's time? Not every sales team needs every type of tool available. Instead, start with software that is foundational, such as a CRM, and build from there. The more you can ensure that each tool is fully utilized, the more streamlined your sales tech stack can be. Any sales tech you adopt should also come with an implementation and roll-out plan to ensure adoption and effectiveness.

For AI to be truly useful at providing accurate real-time analytics and sales forecasting, the underlying data needs to be reliable and well-organized. If data isn't clean and accurate, AI won't be able to generate reliable recommendations or content. Moreover, your data needs to be secured and airtight. When you have access to sensitive customer data, you're obligated to protect it. Still, many companies don't have the right technology in place to support this.

AI offers the potential to help sellers offer reliable predictions and rapid decision support, accelerating the sales cycle and keeping reps focused on the sales pipeline opportunities they are most likely to close — but only if companies work to improve and secure data quality.

Most sales teams value technology that gives back more data than they need to input. This is especially true if it can do research for them, provide them with data they don't have, or integrate data they might need to look up in another system. Salespeople are also often on the go, so any tool generally needs to have a strong mobile component.

Choosing the best sales tech depends on your team's unique needs. Make sure you examine how your people sell, so you know what functionality is needed. More specifically, be sure to consider:

• Functionality and features: Consider whether the tool meets your core needs out of the box or whether it requires (and allows for) customization, should it need to integrate with proprietary systems and processes. What level of administrative support will the tool require? Does that require expertise or resources outside the team?
• Ease of use: Take a good look at the offering alongside a seasoned sales professional who would use the software. What training does the tool require for immediate use and longer-term sustainability? Your salespeople should be able to hit the ground running with minimal training and upkeep. The end user is the best person to tell you whether the tool will aid them or create new bottlenecks.
• Integration: What other tools are part of your current sales tech stack? Are there prebuilt APIs, so you can connect the new system to them?
• Scalability: This tool should have the capacity to scale and grow over time and under increased data loads.
• Performance uptime: This is always a vital consideration when adopting new software. Any downtime translates to time that the sales team can't use the tool, impacting productivity and revenue.
• AI and automations: One clear way to save or "buy back" time is to automate tasks or employ AI. Assess the maturity and security of AI within any potential tool and get a clear understanding of the ease or difficulty for setting up time-saving automations.
• Customer references and reviews: Do your homework. Input from sales execs and sellers is valuable, but read customer reviews online and ask potential vendors to connect you to other clients within your industry.
• Customer service: What level is available to support new technology adoption? If the learning curve is steep and adoption requires support from outside teams, it's vital to ensure this technology is central to the company's overarching goals, has top-down support, and plays well within the existing tech stack.
• Analytics and reporting. Any prospective tools should provide easy insight into the data they're fed. While reporting is generally a table stakes feature, consider whether the tool helps to fill a reporting gap, or whether it will connect to other analytics tools used by the team. At the very least, the tool must be able to provide the core metrics most important to your sales team.

Help your sales team do the most with their time. Sales technology makes it easier to hit sales quotas and earn commission while building revenue for the broader business. Most important, every closed deal represents a new customer whose key challenge is alleviated with your product or service. Everybody wins.