You’ve decided to engage a revenue-generation partner to expand your sales channels, but how do you know which is the best fit for you? There are a number of factors to consider, but none may be as important as their sales tech stack.
Evaluating your prospective partner’s tech stack will not only tell you about what technology their sellers are using, but it will give you deep insight into:
- How the organization views technology—simply an enabler or as a means of driving effectiveness, efficiency, and optimization
- Whether the organization is up to date in the way it thinks about B2B sales
- The organization’s commitment to performing at the very highest levels
- Whether B2B sales is the essence of the organization, or it is one of the many things they do
There are high-performing sales teams and there are outperforming sales teams. You want to work with outperformers. How can you identify an outperforming sales team? The answer lies in their tech stack and how they use it. To help you find outperforming organizations, here are some questions to ask the partners you’re considering.
Perspective on Sales Technology
- Do you view sales technology as nice-to-have or transformational?
- How often do you reimagine the technology aspect of your sales model?
- How is your sales technology integrated into your sales workflow?
- What is the rate of adoption of sales technology by your sellers?
How Sales Technologies Are Used
- What technologies do you use to increase the skill and acumen of your sellers? How are those technologies used to increase skill and acumen?
- What technologies do you use to eliminate wasteful steps in your sales process? How are those technologies used to eliminate wasteful steps?
- What technologies do you use to automate sales processes? What sales processes do those technologies automate?
- What technologies do you use to arm your sellers with information that aids them in their selling? What types of information do those technologies provide?
How Sales Technologies Are Optimized
- What is the role of your business process engineers in evaluating and optimizing your sales processes? How do they design sales processes for each client engagement?
- What is the level of involvement of your instructional designers in evaluating the skills and acumen needed to perform each process at its highest level? How much training do they provide to your sellers on their use of each piece of technology?
- How frequently do your business analysts evaluate areas of process improvement? Provide some examples of situations in which they identified areas of improvement that increased productivity and/or profitability.
- Are your business process engineers, instructional designers, and business analysts embedded in the sales organization?
Building the Stack
- How many sales technologies does your organization review each year? How many does it evaluate? Test? Add to your tech stack?
The CRM
- In what ways is your CRM customized for each client?
- How is are the workflows for each sales role built into your CRM?
- How do you ensure consistent use of the CRM by your sellers?
- In what ways does your CRM guide your sellers in their work?
Skills and Acumen Training
- What skills assessment technology and selling scenarios do you use to determine your sales reps’ strengths and weaknesses? How is your curriculum developed to help address any gaps?
- Describe how you use voice analytics for one-on-one coaching and feedback.
Sales Tech Ownership
- Where does responsibility for discovering, evaluating, implementing, and adopting sales technology reside in your organization?
Understanding not only what is in your prospective partner’s tech stack, but also how they view and use their technology will help you determine whether you’ve identified a good-enough sales partner or an exceptional sales partner. Plenty of companies offer good enough. Wouldn’t you rather have exceptional? Read about how MarketSource builds a Kick-A$$ Tech Stack here >>
Author: Karen Salamone
Karen is Head of Marketing for MarketSource. She is a transformational B2B and B2B2C leader with a history of building marketing organizations, content teams, and demand generation centers of excellence from the ground up. She is recognized for delivering meaningful insights and fresh approaches and for earning best-in-class content, design, and multi-media awards.
