Everyone has seen the huge influx in new cloud-based tools designed to help sales teams with every known aspect of their day. Choice is good. The right tools used well free sales teams up to focus on selling, instead of admin, presentation creation and having a soft ‘sales date’ over a coffee instead of actually making a sale.
Of course, with all these new options, some sales teams have found themselves with the short end of the stick, having been "gifted" new tools which either are of no use at all or just make their day-to-day process more complex instead of more streamlined. It’s like giving a plumber a huge tool box of carpentry tools. Great tools. Wrong need.
So if it’s your job to make the call on what tools your sales team should be using, here is what we’ve learned from experience.
Choose tools to fit your process - not the other way around!
The most important consideration when choosing tools for your sales team (or for any team) is how they fit into your sales process. This sounds so obvious but new sales tools are often approached as if they are part of some magical “technology stack”. The idea that the sales process will be perfect if we just select the right mix of digital tools is the wrong way to think about it.
Tools are only tools. They don’t make up for a broken or absent process.
Instead of starting with the technology, start with an evaluation of your existing sales process and figure out how you want a new tool to fit in. You wouldn’t add a new person to your team without knowing how you want them to help, right? So it makes no sense to add a new tool without a clear idea of what you want it to accomplish in your business.
By starting with your process you’ll be able to easily decide which tools legitimately help your team superpower their sales results, and which ones promise a lot, but do little to improve their efforts.
Simply put: Understand your sales process first, choose the tools that fit that process next. The right tools will supercharge your sales team.