The future of sales tech lies in expanding your view of revenue generation from just the sales team to all customer-facing functions.
The future of sales tech lies in expanding your view of revenue generation from just the sales team to all customer-facing functions.
Sales organizations have long leveraged technologies to improve the productivity of their sellers but are increasingly focused on improving the entire end-to-end revenue process. To optimize your revenue tech roadmap, first audit the state of your sales techology stack.
Download the revenue tech framework to
Discover the core revenue technologies driving growth in sales performance.
Identify potential gaps in your current sales tech stack.
Evaluate technologies to address gaps and accelerate your customer journey by building a robust RevTech stack.
Sales and revenue leaders must position their tech strategy as an integrated accelerant, not a parallel initiative, to generate more pipeline, close more deals and expand customer share of wallet even in disrupted conditions.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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Sales technologies are focused on improving sales execution or automation and increasing sales effectiveness. Key drivers for adopting sales tech include improvements and innovations in the user experience and end-user engagement, more integration, more adoption and application of predictive and prescriptive analytic insights.
Revenue technologies (RevTech) are a set of solutions, applications and platforms built to automate the end-to-end revenue process.
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.
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.
To build a sales tech stack that actually works, organizations must look at all of the available technology and find the appropriate mix that best addresses customer buying journeys and needs. This mix should provide a fusion approach that includes digital commerce; a singular view of the buyer; and a seamless, easy-to-navigate customer experience across channels.
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.
As selling becomes increasingly virtual, companies are investing more in sales technologies. A recent Gartner poll found chief sales officers expect their sales technology budget and virtual sales headcount to increase by 20% in 2022. 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.
Sales technology can help sales in the following ways: