Expand the scope of revenue generation beyond the sales team through sales technology and sales tool adoption.
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Sales Technology: Develop a Plan to Support Revenue Growth
Revenue tech is the new sales tech
Sales organizations have long leveraged technologies to improve seller productivity but are increasingly focused on improving the end-to-end revenue process. To optimize your revenue tech roadmap, first audit the state of your sales and revenue technology stack.
Download the sales tech guide to:
Discover the core technologies driving growth in sales performance
Identify gaps in your current sales tech stack
Evaluate RevTech options to help address gaps and speed the buyer journey
The components of a modern sales tech strategy
Successful sales and revenue leaders integrate their tech strategy with sales strategy to accelerate pipeline growth, close more deals and expand customer wallet share even in disrupted conditions.
- Optimize RevTech Strategy
- Prioritize Tech Trends
- Plan the Sales Tech Stack
- Fuel Sales Tool Adoption
Grow and automate with a solid revenue technology investment strategy
To grow in this hypercompetitive and digital B2B buying landscape, you need an aggressive level of tech investment, designed to deliver value, information and products to customers throughout the entire customer life cycle. While sales tech focuses on improving the effectiveness of sellers, a revenue technology strategy is essential to:
Help buyers and sellers/sales organizations adopt new RevTech
Use automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
Scale up what works and scale down what doesn’t
Growth requires a revenue tech strategy based on three attributes:
Cross-functional alignment: Implement a coalition of executives, operations and business technologist stakeholders to share data, workflows and analytics to optimize how the business is run across systems.
Revenue technology stack: Design a revenue tech stack that delivers outcomes by eliminating mundane technology work, streamlining the workflow needs of customer-facing roles and providing customizable building blocks to meet the needs of each business unit.
Communal data: Develop specific use cases for sharing customer data that provide value to your customer by orchestrating data and workflows throughout the RevTech stack.
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Stay competitive by monitoring and making the most of sales technology trends
Adopting innovative technologies and practices provides revenue organizations with a competitive edge because it enables new functionality, such as hyperautomation, AI and ML. These functionalities influence some of the core priorities of an organization: pipeline generation, seller execution and account growth.
However, prioritizing technologies to invest in is challenging, especially in this period of “sales tech mayhem,” where the vendor market is moving from a wide set of categories to a narrow list of vendors with wide portfolios of capabilities. Besides auditing the value of your RevTech stack, the best way to tame the mayhem is to continually monitor technology trends and the vendor landscape, especially as mergers and acquisitions consolidate providers.
Design an effective, future-ready revenue tech stack
An effective revenue tech stack design requires cross-functional collaboration between executive, operations and business technologist stakeholders. The stack integrates organizational priorities throughout sales, marketing and other functions to drive growth with technology vision and investments. A revenue tech roadmap connects the current state with an aspirational future state and dictates how to bridge gaps in people, process, technology and data.
An optimized revenue tech stack is broken into three pillars:
Technology stack adoption is driven by three factors: user-centric enablement, workflow design and documentation, and vendor management.
Data management includes the setup of the necessary data quality, governance and orchestration needed to run the end-to-end process, workflows and analytics throughout the stack.
Tech stack talent refers to the operations, enablement and talent needed to manage the tech stack and deploy advanced technologies, such as automation, AI and ML.
Engage sales enablement and sellers in the sales tool adoption process
Simply buying sales technology is not enough. Organizations should be hyperfocused on securing early adoption of new sales tools to prevent those new investments from becoming shelfware.
Given the intersection of RevTech usage and seller workflow, sales tools have become an influential component of the overall seller experience. Poor sales tool investment decisions can quickly and easily lead to a poor employee experience, resulting in additional seller drag, contributing to sales force attrition and further putting the return on RevTech investment at risk.
Successful CSOs focus on three activities to fuel sales tool adoption:
Define the sales stages. Sequence the sales stages based on the customer buying jobs. The buying jobs can also help define the sales objective at each stage — for example, instead of “improve buyer confidence,” the objective should be to “confirm the problem-solution fit.” Redesign sales tools to create collaborative resources that sellers and customers can use together to improve the buying experience.
Have sales enablement and sellers weigh in. Sales technologies are integrated into all aspects of the buying process. Sales enablement’s role in making these solutions effective is critical. Rather than the standard, “how this works” type of training, give sales enablement a voice in the planning and acquisition process for sales tools. Before making a purchasing decision, capture seller feedback while evaluating revenue technology as a means of testing the likelihood of adoption and overall experience sellers will have with that technology.
Enable adoption. Proactively plan for the use cases and value conversations with the sales force about the importance of upcoming technology. Build fundamental skills in the sales force that help sellers harness the power of the revenue tech stack specifically. Sellers with digital dexterity will be eager to embrace new tech and use it to the benefit of their prospects and customers.
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FAQ on revenue technology and sales tools
What is RevTech?
Revenue technologies (RevTech) are a set of solutions, applications and platforms built to automate the end-to-end revenue process.
What is a sales technology stack?
An organization’s sales tech stack is a collection of essential technologies built to automate the revenue process end to end. These technologies span engagement, application, sales enablement, sales operations, infrastructure and third-party data, and are the foundation for predictable, efficient growth.
What is a revenue tech stack?
A revenue tech stack is a collection of software solutions built to help sales teams strategize optimizing sales productivity. This combination of tools helps to improve sales productivity from smarter pipeline generation, deal management and account expansion.
How does sales technology improve sales productivity?
Sales technologies support organizations’ goals, such as digital transformation, managing flexible work, and putting buyers and customer experience (CX) at the center of the journey. They also help mitigate market and economic conditions that are unpredictable and have the potential to upend business processes. Favored sales technologies help organizations mitigate risk, build pipelines and improve revenue outcomes through improved CX. Most recently, there has been a renewed focus on optimization of processes to improve resiliency given economic uncertainty.
How are sales tools and technology used in selling?
As selling becomes increasingly virtual, companies are investing more in sales technologies. The market is growing rapidly and has accelerated exponentially with the rush to virtual selling due to the pandemic and new ways of working. The following technologies are deemed “essential,” considering they support basic fundamentals of selling, regardless of transaction speed and complexity.
Customer relationship management technology: automates sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities
Revenue data solutions: composed of market intelligence, account and contact data; enables prioritization of prospect and customer account and contact data using insights and propensity signals, integrated into daily seller workflows
Video conferencing: creates secure, sensory-rich virtual meetings that are easy for buyers to join and sellers to host
Partner relationship management: a tool where indirect partners comprise a significant percentage of revenue, equipping resell partners to help end customers through the buying and ownership cycle
E-sign: faster processing time and lower administrative and storage fees