Your sales team needs management software. How can you find the perfect fit?

As a Founder, while scaling up my small enterprise's sales team, finding the perfect sales management software was a critical task. Here's my two cents. Let the tool selection be in alignment with the pain points you as a Founder or Team Leader encounter. There are several tools in the market, which position themselves as a one-stop shop software for all client needs. These tools are hardware resource intensive and might increase your costs. Also, some of their features may turn out to be irrelevant for your business and seldom used. Why invest in a tool when not all features are relevant (unless you have deep pockets)? As a bootstrapped venture, I would rather partner with a software company, tailored to solve my unique problem.

Understanding of current state especially down to individual is key. Some individual may prefer a certain way of working and some other ways. What I found in this discovery phase are: 1) sales appreciates simplicity. 2) sales often do not know a lot of features of their current tools. 3) sales may want this but what is the need With this, you will discover the gap which can come in many form. From their skills, knowledge and processes. Then prioritize the gap to address as one is not superman, will not be able to fulfill 100% of their gap.

As both a sales coach and CRO of a software company, you need to find a platform with a solid track record, plenty of white papers, and a solid demo so you can make the best decision. Don't just have decision makers on the demo but users of the software too. Create benchmarks for comparison between platforms and their features/benefits too.

Continuos improvement is key and while it seems obvious is often overlooked. Selecting a tool that impacts your sales process is not a linear activity. Is a focus area that requires your analysis, execution and reassessment, ensuring that you don't fall complacent but instead allow a culture for , error and learn to mature and lift your entire team to another level of execution leveraging best in class technology and tools. At the end of the day, your goal is to win customers not to specialize in tools . Said that finding a tool your team embraces will be a differentiator and that is the ultimate goal you are pursuing. Give your sales experts an edge and making sure they see this as such, so that everyone is looking to Innovate & win.

The most important thing here, before looking at any software solution, is to truly define what you want from it! Far too many people get excited about a piece of software and what it can do, and then try to ‘shoehorn’ the software in to their organisation! When that happens, there is often a clash with existing culture and processes, and then people inside the company ‘reject’ the software. And even worse, some start to sabotage it, so they can go back to ‘the way things used to be’. So all the effort and investment in the software is then wasted. Make sure you don’t make this very common mistake!

What is the culture of the company? Is the company ready for such implementation whereby most sales would think that is a tracking mechanism, to find fault with them. Perhaps the key is not to management the sale people but to manage the process.

I have been a part of many implementation projects of various organisations where in they wanted to improve the cadence by implementing a sales management software The top 3 differences where it got implemented 1. Owners vision is aligned that it’s needed and he/she ensured that we will see that it gets implemented 2. Identification of the spoc (single point of contact) for implementation was someone who didn’t loose hope 3. After sales support provided by the software team