Curating the Modern Revenue Tech Stack

In today’s digital sales landscape, the tech stack plays an increasingly critical role in powering a company’s ability to maintain productivity as the business environment evolves.

As such, curating the right tech stack is table stakes for companies to keep up with the competition. If platforms are poorly aligned with existing systems, disconnected from different teams, or producing data that grows outdated and inaccurate from disuse, the tech will end up becoming isolated from the very people it was meant to support.

Few areas are more vital to achieve an efficient tech stack in than sales teams. Sales, as part of the revenue engine, is at the forefront of driving revenue, and sales reps are the ones directly communicating and connecting with customers on a daily basis. The modern revenue tech stack needs to help sales reps work with customers on a personal level, but also stay efficient and effective.

“I think that’s where sales enablement can really step in and show a lot of value for sales teams,” said Matthew Bills, Salesforce platform director at Fulton Financial Corporation. “How do we give them more opportunities to talk to the right customers at the right time with the right information? How do our customers ultimately feel like we understand them in deeper, more meaningful ways, and we’re there to support them through these challenging situations?”

By integrating enablement tools into the tech stack, businesses can be assured that tech is working with, rather than isolated from, frontline salespeople. As this year’s State of Sales Enablement Report found, the use of sales enablement technologies has increased by 5% year over year, and these companies have been 19% more likely to see an increase in their win rate.

Below, learn how the modern tech stack can be curated to equip reps to overcome selling adversity, sell better and more confidently, and drive revenue and growth for the business.

Enhancing Buyer and Rep Confidence to Accelerate Sales Velocity

The challenge many reps are facing, one that is increasing the length of sales cycles and prolonging selling motions, revolves around buyer indecision. The uptick in buyer speculation, spurred by the buyer’s ability to conduct a vast amount of research prior to engaging in a deal and their choice to include more decision-makers throughout the process, means that buyers need more financial justification for their purchases.

In such an economic climate, maintaining sales velocity is tricky. Just as buyers are understanding more about the product landscapes they are interested in, reps also need to understand their buyer demographics, what motivates buyers, and how to overcome their hesitations and dissolve their doubts. With the support of sales enablement tools, this task becomes simpler.

For example, sales play tools show reps how to navigate different selling situations. By understanding the buyer’s journey, possible industry factors, and potential pain points, reps are 15% more likely to know how to handle the sales scenarios they will come across. Teams that support their reps with sales play technologies report a three-percentage-point increase in average win rates, a demonstrably strong testament to how a supportive enablement strategy that understands what engages buyers can boost a rep’s selling activity.

Similarly, tools such as digital sales rooms, which are microsites that sellers can use to consolidate resources for buyers throughout the sales process, can help drive buyer confidence through personalized engagements. In fact, reps who used digital sales rooms this year were 46% more likely to have an increased win rate year over year.

Cultivating High Performance by Reinforcing Sales Behaviors

To make the most out of its investments and resources and carry it through and beyond this period of economic fragility, businesses have been focusing their efforts on consolidating and operationalizing their sales efforts to stay productive with less. For enablement, that means helping to boost the productivity of reps that are stuck in that middle level of performance.

The solution to unlocking consistent rep performance and getting reps out of that ditch of middle-level attainment lies in using tools that close skill gaps and reinforces high-performing behaviors. It’s not productive to counter poor performance by spending more to hire additional people to increase activity. Rather, tools can be used to help train and coach lower performers to continually improve and fine-tune their skills in an efficient and scalable way. For example, organizations that leverage sales training tools report a 5-percentage-point increase in average rep quota attainment.

Additionally, tools that provide data-driven insights into rep activity can help managers pinpoint behavioral gaps and provide coaching to lower-performing reps that reinforce the right behaviors. This is of particular importance this year, as almost half of sales teams are not confident in their managers’ coaching abilities. But when armed with data-driven insights, managers can deliver more personalized and effective coaching, which can help instill confidence. And when managers are effective coaches, reps are 40% more likely to be confident in their abilities to perform, thereby inspiring success.

Leveraging Data-Driven Enablement to Boost Productivity

A tech stack without robust analytics can result in gaps between teams like sales and marketing, leading to people across the business lacking the full picture of what works best to engage buyers. As such, they may end up spending time on the wrong opportunities and losing the right ones.

Knowing what good looks like is the first step to replicating and scaling it across the business. When organizations have insights into what works, they are 46% more likely to improve the efficiency of their revenue teams. Plus, the use of tools that provide those data-driven insights into what good looks like for enablement are correlated with 7-percentage-point higher average win rates.

An increase in sales velocity comes not only from those increased win rates from sales reps but the ability for enablement to feed actionable insights back to the business to help shape the initiatives of the company. Enablement supports alignment across the business and the data that enablement tools provide can be used to optimize sales strategies for the future.

“A very simple formula around sales velocity provides a launching point to a myriad of conversations that you can have with your business leaders, and you can tie a variety of those metrics to many different sales initiatives across the board,” said Bills. “Ultimately what we’re doing is then tracking all of those metrics month over month, year over year, quarter over quarter, to understand ‘How are the dynamics of those different areas changing? Are we seeing success?’”

Aligning the Tech Stack to Strategic Business Initiatives

Sometimes, using tech effectively can feel like a headache, rather than a help. Enablement’s role in curating the tech stack is to ensure that this doesn’t happen for reps, but that the tools at their disposal help them focus on the key activities that move the needle on business outcomes. To avoid unnecessary complexity when building a tech stack, ensure platforms are lined up with specific outcomes that achieve business goals.

“Especially as a sales enablement practitioner, we see new software innovations coming to market very frequently,” said Kunal Pandya, vice president of global enablement at Corsearch. “We can get very easily excited by something new that’s out there and want to buy it, but always keep your KPIs in mind and ask yourself: How will this tool impact the key business or sales levers that I’m tracking and trying to pull? How will it add value to the business and what problems will it actually solve?”

To find the right enablement technologies to add to a tech stack, think about the people that will be using it in their roles: the salespeople that drive the revenue engine of a business. Good enablement tools will make their workload less clunky, more efficient, and better directed toward success for the business.

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