I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. “Your buyer has changed.”
Touting the features and functions of your product in static sales presentations won’t help your sellers hit their quotas. Leading value-driven sales discussions that address your buyer’s challenges while demonstrating the financial impact your product or service will have on their business will. Today’s sellers need to elevate the sales conversation from transactional to interactive to stand out and meet buyer expectations. While implementing a sales enablement technology can help you accelerate your sales transformation journey, it’s only a piece of a much bigger picture.
In Sales Hacker’s 2018 Sales Tech Landscape, the company counts over 830 vendors – a 15% surge over 2017 1. With sales tools ranging from sales engagement to productivity and enablement, to sales intelligence, pipeline and analytics, and people management, the sales tech landscape profiles hundreds of companies that exist solely to help you digitally transform your business for improved buying experiences.
With so many technologies available, it can be difficult to identify what you truly need and prioritize the different deployments within your overall strategy. Selecting a sales enablement technology to anchor your sales tech ecosystem is a great start on your journey to total sales transformation, but you’ll want to ensure the platform you choose is flexible and future-proof. Here’s why:
Digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. Chances are, you’ve formulated your strategy and are continuously investing to keep up with the ever-changing needs of your business. You’ve taken a phased approach to implementing new sales technologies to ensure successful deployment, proper onboarding, and maximum adoption. Working with a vendor that can easily integrate with the CMS, CRM or LMS you’ve already implemented saves you money, time, and resources. But your project becomes increasingly complicated if you’re forced to move to a vendor’s preferred platform or stuck using disparate systems due to a total lack of integration.
As the sales tech space continues to grow, you’ll undoubtedly see more and more companies building in new functionality or acquiring other vendors to stay competitive. Keep in mind, experience is everything. Focus on identifying and selecting a best of breed sales enablement platform that increases the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales and marketing teams and truly helps them elevate their sales approach to offer buyers a value-based sales experience.
Beware of companies that hastily integrate acquired technologies as “press release” integrations or build mediocre functionality into their product to “check the box” and claim they can “do it all”. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for sales transformation. Focus on the handful of capabilities that will move the needle for your company and find the vendor that is best at those things. This is more important than understanding all of the features available as many of those will be rudimentary or underdeveloped just to “check the box.” Every sales enablement platform is unique — find the one that is unique in the ways that are most important to you.
There are always going to be new and emerging solutions available to increase efficiencies and help your sellers win. Deploying a best-in-class sales enablement technology means selecting one with the flexibility to seamlessly integrate with other best-in-class sales technologies and putting it at the heart of your ecosystem. This will ensure you not only protect your existing investments, but also future-proof your solution by offering your company the ability to take advantage of new and cutting edge technologies for maximum sales effectiveness and more deals won.
Comments are closed.