Stack Ranking Your Sales Tech Stack: Plus the one must-have tool to include

As Chief Revenue Officers, we constantly evaluate our sales technology stack. As we move into the second half of the year, budget planning forces us to consider the cost per rep, and eliminate non-essential platforms. With so many options on the market, it's important to ensure we're using the right tools to empower our team and drive revenue results. We recently conducted a thorough review, and while some tools may be on the chopping block, there's one absolutely essential tool. (Full disclosure - I’m an advisor for the company, but I was a customer first, so my bias is based on real-world experience)

As a sales leader of 30+ years, I’ve worked at some of the best sales organizations in the world, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises like HP. I’ve seen lots of tools come and go.

Here’s the list of 8 tools that we intend to keep, and I’m going to highlight the one that truly makes a difference:

1. CRM: Sure, we complain about them all, but pick your poison. You have to have one.I’ve used Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, Dynamics, it doesn’t matter which one, but find a way to make it easy for your sellers to enjoy using the tool and for you to get visibility into the real data you need to manage revenue and forecast.
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator: It’s the only tool where prospects actually maintain their own information. I didn’t buy in during the early days, but it’s now the most valuable prospecting tool available.
3. Data Enrichment Platform:? Again, take your pick. For North America, ZoomInfo has the best intent data and “good enough” coverage.? For Europe, Cognism is king for GDPR compliant data. Outside of that, others like Apollo, Lusha, Seamless, but you get what you pay for.
4. Video/Conference Platform: Zoom is still the easiest. Meet is frustrating but usually works. If you deal with Banking & Financial Services, be prepared to do a lot of Teams calls. In the end, you will probably use all three, based on your customer’s requirements. And don’t even get me started on Amazon Chime.? (If you know, you know!)
5. Sales Engagement/Conversation Intelligence:? Outreach or Salesloft.? I’ve replaced Salesloft with Outreach in the past because of their inclusion of Kaia Conversation Intelligence, but since the acquisition of Drift, Salesloft is a contender, but you still need Gong or similar. We’ve been using a new tool called Fathom, which has impressive AI summarization and good integrations.
6. Marketing Automation: I’ll keep this in the list as a standalone since it is often owned by marketing and may not be part of sales budget, but you can combine this with your CRM if you consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Hubspot.? As CRO, the focus is ensuring tight integration between systems.? Adobe Engage (Marketo) is still in the hunt for very large enterprises.
7. Value selling: Guided discovery + ROI + price quote + proposal generation + ongoing CSM platform: ValueCore, see below.I’ll share why this is my non-negotiable tool in a future post.
8. Toss-up tool: Trimming the list to 8 is difficult, and hopefully, you have some corporate tools that don’t hit your budget. Things like Slack, Loom, Highspot, LMS, Content Management and others can often be owned by other departments. If you are a decent salesperson, you can convince them they really need it! I like to try new tools often, and everything is Generative AI now, so look for something that will move the needle in your team's productivity, or revenue production. AI outbound prospecting, deal intelligence,? etc.

FYI, you also need a sales methodology based on your customer buyer behavior. (I’m an advocate of tearing up the playbook and making data-driven decisions), but you still need a process. I’ve used most of them, Sandler, Command of the Message, Spin Selling, and Customer Centric Selling (I still argue that MEDDIC and its variations are deal checklists and NOT methodologies). It doesn’t matter which one you use, but you have to apply it consistently and with the same vernacular across the org. If you use “Champion” or “Economic Buyer”, everyone should align on the definition.

As you can see, 6 of these tools are internally facing.? These are sales productivity tools that manage the business and drive greater efficiency and effectiveness in our teams.? The one tool I’m highlighting here is an externally facing platform that brings the prospect into a collaborative experience, equips them with the tools needed to justify an investment to solve a pain, and generates dynamic customer-facing content.? This is my value-selling platform.

Few will argue against value-selling.? However, trying to demonstrate ROI with a spreadsheet, case studies from different customers, or generic TCO/TEI documents have little impact and often delay decision-making.? As a sales leader, you can only gain deep insight into a few deals, and without visibility into prospect engagement, you are forecasting with blinders on.??

I’ll follow up in a few days with my key criteria for a platform.? Good selling!