Welcome to the 2023 version of: Sales Stack: Tools for Professional Sales

Sales Stack 2023: The Sales Tools for Professional Sales


Sales Stack 2023

Sales Tools for Professional B2B Sales



SALES STACK 2023:
Sales Tools for
Professional Sales



SALES STACK
2023:
Sales Tools
for
Professional
Sales


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Sales tools and figuring out what your sales stack 2023 should look like is as challenging as ever. Which problems are the most pressing for your and your B2B sales team? Which processes can and need to be powered by technology for you and your team to sell more? Which B2B sales technology trends will deliver on their promise and help you make it to and beyond your goals?

Trends which MAY impact your Sales Stack in 2023

Sales is in constant development. Customer demands, technology evolution, and competition propel sales forward in an ever-changing state. Picking up on the trends impacting your industry's buying behaviour, and determining if they're accurate or not is critical to success. Here's a few, which are likely to impact your decisions about focus and technology in 2023.

Does nobody want to speak to sales people any more?

For about as long as we've had webshops, its been predicted that buyers just don't want to speak with sales people. For sales stack 2023 it's business as usual: again plenty of media outlets are joining the choir.

What customers want is help solving problems. Being a B2B buyer isn't easy. The ocean of information about solutions to problems is increasingly tough to see through. That's why buyers are teaming up with sales people who operate as authorities within their field.

These sales people talk to customers about how to meet their goals, solve their problems, and cover their needs. Buyers DO want to speak with these kinds of sales people.

At the other end of the spectrum, buyers do NOT want to speak to sales people about easy fixes, transactional buying, and low risk procurement. Think automation into how you compete in that space.

This drives for example the growth in capabilities to create automated, interactive demo experiences. 

Budgets shrink or remain unchanged

This is a tough one. 2023 looks very much like another year of uncertainty, with inflation, conflict, and energy crisis not helping one bit. Inflation and for some the ensuing inflation correction has meant that some budgets remain the same or are cut in terms of full-time employees for 2023.

For sales stack 2023 choices this means you need to put on your creativity hat when trying to cover more ground with the same or less people on either your sales team or aligning teams like marketing, consultants, and software development.

Having a careful look at how sales stack 2023 can be used to automate processes, which previously were handheld will be valuable in keeping or boosting productivity.

Engage with More Stakeholder - or Lose!

The macroeconomic challenges mentioned above will lead to organisations doing all they can to make sure resources are distributed across the right initiatives. For B2B sellers this will mean engaging with more individuals to support the buying process. For sales stack 2023, this means thinking about ways to make sure to cover all their bases by mapping and speaking to all stakeholders.

Again, sales teams will expect the same or growing performance from sales people, yet engaging with more stakeholders becomes a time challenge for busy sales people. Time to think creatively about where and how to automate parts of the buying experience.

Design and align with the Customer Experience Journey

We first spoke here about the Customer Experience Journey in our article about Belgian-based Sales Technology. Have a look there for further pointers - the main message is that you should think carefully about the experience you'd like existing and prospective customers to have, when they engage with your organization either digitally or directly.

You'll find that this will be our perspective when discussing sales stack 2023 as well: how does technology ABC help customers solve problem XYZ.

Important information on using this list

In an effort to make this list more valuable as a source of information, we've moved away from text-based lists like in previous years, and instead we're using Airtable at the engine to display information. Have patience while the Airtable views load. With them you have the following features available while viewing:

  • Scroll within table views: tables may not be displayed completely, simply because it's too much data. In each table window, you're able to scroll through all the contents of that table view.
  • Filter table views: You can make filters on any field type on this page. For instance, that means you could potentially filter on any sales tool, which integrates with Google, Salesforce, Outreach, or whatever other sales technology you have, which you'd like to integrate with.

What is sales technology here to do?

When it comes to sales technology quite often sales tech isn't picked based on what YOU need, but based on what your network have been using for their sales process. What you should be making decisions based on is, which sales processes generates the best outcomes you're after - and for your customers.

Generally speaking you want to move the needle on four dials in sales:

  • the number of opportunities you're working on;
  • the average deal value per opportunity;
  • your conversion rate - at all stages of the sales process;
  • how fast you move opportunities through the sales funnel.

Sales tools aim to maximize sales' performance in each of these four areas, mostly through acceleration and automation. A Sales Professional without appropriate sales tools is like a carpenter without a hammer and nails. Whether you're a VP Sales of a Sales Development Representative, you should expect your company to equip you to get the job done.

If you're with a company in sales or you're an individual Sales Professional, this is where you get your insight on the tools that can make you selling more faster in 2023. As a company you really don't want to fall behind. Same goes for Sales Professionals. In both cases, not knowing what's possible leaves you behind in the global sales tools arms race. Now more than ever!

Let's not wait any further. Connect with Jakob on LinkedIn to stay updated on all things sales and let's dive into looking at the sales tools, which will power your sales process and take you to your next level of growth.

Do you know of software, which belongs on this list? Do share!!

The 2023 Sales Stack Tools List


 

CRM

CRMs We Use

With sales consulting, lead generation, and outsourced sales clients in the range of 1 to 1500 full time employees you can imagine we come across quite a few different CRMs. Starting 2023 the CRMs we work most with and ecounter the most are Salesflare, Pipedrive, and Hubspot.

Salesflare became one of the CRMs we tinker with way back in 2017. It shines in allowing sales professionals to not spend much time at all updating the CRM and maximize sales time. It'll track any Google-based Sales Professional's efforts across email, calendar, and phone, and share interaction clients have had with emails, websites, or when they've called back. Sales Pros are reminded to pay attention to opportunities before they grow stale. Since its inception the workflows and reporting capabilities have grown tremendously as well! Finally the LinkedIn integration features put Salesflare in a category of its own. Visit Salesflare to get free trial and a demo.

Pipedrive has been part of YourSales and many of our outsourced sales assignments since the beginning. It's one of the most simple and powerful CRMs around to set up - all you gotta do is add data. Probably one of the first to use the now prevalent kanban view for opportunity management. With the launch of the Pipedrive Marketplace a very wide range of third party apps & integrations. For Sales Stack 2023 we'll be using it specifically to automate and ensure engagement with buyer persona stakeholders. The folks at Pipedrive and a free trial can be reached here.

Hubspot CRM - probably have the best free version around. And that's probably why we come across Hubspot as much as we do, as well as for its marketing capabilities. In addition Hubspot has going for it that it's a suite, which aims to solve an entire range of problems for organisations. Increasingly Hubspot seems to be moving in the Salesforce direction and is used increasingly outside of sales and marketing as well.

Salesforce.com - does it even fit the CRM category anymore? Obviously, Salesforce is the gorilla in the CRM-room, having been around since the beginning of SaaS. It's interesting - it's both the CRM everyone aspires to be like and be different than.

Microsoft Dynamics - yes, it seems like we're increasingly running into companies with Microsoft's CRM. If you're strong in the Microsoft ecosystem this one could be a good choice for you.

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      All CRMs

      Of course that's not it - that's not it at all. The full overview of our recorded CRMs can be found below for both small, medium and larger companies. Below you'll be able to review which CRMs fit your existing technology environment. Scroll to the right in the table below  and filter for integrations to find what works for you.

      Share the CRMs

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      Account Based Selling

      At the slightly more pointy end of sales complexity and price, spending more time per customer is easy to justify.

      "Account Based Selling" treats the customer as a market of one. In a market of one you would personalise everything. Since we are after all not in a market of just a single customer and time is a finite resource, Account Based Selling tools emerged to help us all edge closer to scaling personalisation efforts and help create more tailored buying committee experiences.

      Familiar focuses in this category include:

      • tailor-made content;
      • narrowly defined ideal customer profiles;
      • roles and responsibilities in the buying process;
      • buyer personas clearly defined including individual pain points;
      • mutual agreements and milestones throughout the buying process;
      • highly targeted and personalised outreach based on all of the above.

      As you can tell from the bullet points above, Account Based Selling goes hand in hand with Account Based Marketing and tight alignment between Sales and Marketing is absolutely essential.

      To kick your Account Based Selling efforts off, do explore the tools below. Don't forget to have a look a the Account Based Marketing category as well.

       
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      Account Based Marketing

      Share these ABM tools

       
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      Buyer Enablement

       
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      Conversation Intelligence

      What is Conversation Intelligence:
      In short Conversation Intelligence is the gathering and the analysis of conversations with the aim of saving time and improving sales outcomes structurally. Imagine if you could qualify every single lead faster and more accurately and consistently convert the good leads faster at a higher rate. That's the promise of Conversation Intelligence.

      Why is Conversation Intelligence Important?:
      As with most other categories there are plenty of good reasons to get started with Conversation Intelligence tools. Here are a few:

      • sales managers don't really generally have the time, the skills nor the insight to provide accurate and impactful coaching based on listening in on live or recorded calls;
      • saves time by helping reps more efficiently (dis-)qualify leads;
      • helps sales leaders understand the answers to many of the questions they'll have about individual deals;
      • help sales reps get A LOT better through actually knowing what works and getting coached on implementing it;
      • increases the impact of those highly-paid sales reps and improves the conversion of those expensive leads.

      How is Conversation Intelligence Done?:
      In B2B sales we'll be using call recording, call transcriptions, call analytics and call scoring across all sorts of calling communication including video calls. Conversation Intelligence obvious benefits can be reaped across all customer communications including calls, video, email, sms, and chat. Use the filters in the table below to see if your technology is supported by either offering.

      Potential shortcomings?:
      Conversation Intelligence used to be by and large an English-only affair. That meant your French-German-Dutch-Japanese-Nordic language sales communication would remain a "mystery" for the foreseeable future. Watch our for language support in the solutions you're considering.

       
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      Social Selling

      Social Selling is one of those terms, which has been sliced all sorts of ways. As a consequence social selling means different things to different people. In our view, sales is a craft which is all about reducing the distance between people. Tools , which help sales get more social with their customers and help them build relationships, belong in the social selling category.

      We Use

      • Salesflare - Put Your CRM inside LinkedIn.
        We already used Salesflare as our main CRM at YourSales. In Q1 of 2023, though, the team at Salesflare launched their integration with LinkedIn. Instead of trying to put LinkedIn inside Salesflare, they've gone down the opposite path and put the Salesflare CRM inside the LinkedIn user experience. The result is a surprisingly useful ability to interact with all CRM features from anywhere in LinkedIn. 

      • LinkedIn Sales Navigator – The social selling era starts now.
        LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the regular LinkedIn on steroids. Work with anyone, anywhere, now.

      • Shield App - Real-time LinkedIn Analytics
        Before the introduction of Shield App, going through our LinkedIn social selling and content data was rather difficult if not impossible. Now, we have clear, live, actionable insights for any component we'd like analytics of.

      • Vidyard - Screen Recording and Video Creation
        Probably the best non-meeting way to present content to customers is through videos. We use Vidyard for small explainers and messages with or without screen sharing.
       
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      Collateral Tracking

      We Use

         
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        Web Visitor ID/Tracking

        What if you would know which companies visit your website? You know, truly know for sure which ones... The tracking of website visitors has several applications. You can use it for lead generation, website optimization, and personalization of the web experience to name a few.

        We Use

         
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        Sales Intelligence / LeadGen

         
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        Smart Scheduling

        Smart schedulers help people come to an agreement about a time to talk faster, with greater accuracy and help ensure the appointment goes through with minimum cancellations. For sales teams the benefits are obvious and also include load-balancing within sales teams, round-robin scheduling, or finding time in multiple team members calendars.

        Despite equally obvious benefits for prospects, the topic of schedulers is often fiercely debated. New users will often ask themselves if customers will be turned off from using schedulers and simply not book meetings. Others and very few, often on the buying side, will wholeheartedly argue that just sending a scheduling link objectifies them to just "a prospect on the sales conveyor belt". Their feeling is one of being valued less, it's wise to engineer a response to this feeling.

        The bottom line for all parties included is clear, though: more meetings get scheduled much faster. They get scheduled with greater accuracy - especially across time zones. They'll fit schedules better and smarter ensure that buyers are helped in a timely manner. More of them go through because of calendar invitations and reminders via channels like email and sms. For when plans need to change they offer easy ways to reschedule appointments.

        Here at YourSales we've used smart scheduling to book thousands of conversations for about a decade. For that entire time we've been using several of the schedulers listed below, with Calendly consistently in a class of its own. This is not to say that other schedulers we've worked with from Harmonizely (strong option for CalDav calendars), Pipedrive or Hubspot are bad. It's just that Calendly is that good.

        Have a look for yourself in the detailed comparison in the table below. Make sure to use the filters to find what's most important for you.

           
           

          Prospecting Leadgen List Creation

          In most B2B lead generation campaigns a certain level of list building or data enrichment will be required. Check out here where that fits in a successful outreach campaign.

          We Use

               
               

              Marketing Enablement & Automation

              We Use

                • Story Chief – create awareness and gather initial interest
                  Story Chief makes it a lot easier to generate inspiring thought leadership content and distribute it to blogs, social networks, influencers, email marketing software and more.

                Other Tools

                 
                 

                Performance Management

                 
                 

                Sales Learning & Onboarding

                 
                 
                 
                 

                Sales Forecasting

                What is Sales Forecasting:
                Predicting with varying degrees of accuracy which deals or which volume of business is going to close within a certain time period. Forecasting sales volume for product categories is a common addition.

                Why is Sales Forecasting Important?:
                This varies by industry and the range of reasons for forecasting is fairly wide. It includes the following:

                • manufacturing products in correct amounts at the appropriate time and help with correct resource allocation;
                • managing stock market expectations for revenue, profit, and for specific product categories;
                • an accurate forecast makes it possible to create plans.

                How is Sales Forecasting Done?:
                In B2B sales the most well-known method is the forecast call or forecast meeting, where each Sales Professional estimates the near-, medium- and/or long-term for their respective areas. All input is consolidated into a department and company view of the total sales forecast.

                Sales reps, of course, can't hold or crunch vast amounts of data on product category splits sold vs forecasted, seasonal changes, and  under-/over-forecasting percentages.

                For this and other reasons companies increasingly use technology to gain productivity and increased understanding in the forecasting process, in order to efficiently produce an accurate company-wide forecast.

                This category represents those much needed tools.

                 
                 

                Email Outreach

                Email outreach technology is used for sending email sequences to both prospects, testers, existing customers and for onboarding. It's also used for marketing purposes to send newsletters and various pieces of news.

                Popular features of course include tracking, email builders, A/B testing, and statistics.

                We Use

                • Salesflare – The Intelligent Sales CRM
                  Most of the time we actually default back to Salesflare's campaign feature. It allows us to send out the right email to clients and prospects in a timely manner, and seeing what happens with that email after sending. Simple & effective.
                   
                   

                  Email Verification

                  If you've ever run an email campaign, the importance of using valid and updated email addresses will not be lost on you.

                  When building a sales stack - your collection of sales tools for professional B2B Sales - email validation and verification is essential.

                  A few of the many benefits of email validation and verification include:

                  • Increased campaign efficiency
                  • Bigger bang for your resources
                  • Way lower bounce rates
                  • Reducing spam complaints
                  • Get more engagement

                  We speak about email verification in terms of the problem being solved. When it comes to email verification the problem is invalid data. That's why you'll see that a number of the tools on our list below are not pure email verification services, and others are very much pure.

                  Here's our selection. Enjoy:

                  We Use

                  • Bouncer - Email Verification Done Right
                    You know why email doesn't work? It's because those email addresses get outdated lightning fast - literally. Bouncer helps us make sure our data is accurate, so we'll be able to properly stay in touch with our clients and potential clients.
                  • Apollo - No One Ever Drowned in Revenue

                    Other Tools

                     
                     

                    Field Sales Management

                    What is Field Sales Management?:
                    Selling in the field presents its own set of challenges if it is to be done efficiently. Software for Field Sales Management helps solve those challenges.

                    Why is Field Sales Management Important?:
                    Sales Professionals are expensive valuable for the companies they work for. Sales Professionals in the field, sitting in their car, public transportation, or idling in an airplane are SUPER expensive.

                    Sales Leaders and Sales Professionals alike have a keen interest in maximizing sales time going into the field.

                    How is Field Sales Management Done?:
                    Sales Pro's use Field Sales tools to crush their quotas by:

                    • optimizing route planning, getting the best route to the best prospects;
                    • convert inefficient and idle planning time to revenue-generating client-facing time;
                    • make the most of unforeseen schedule changes by replanning on the fly;
                    • increase conversion rates through leaving a good first impression by simply being on time.

                    Sales Leaders profit too by:

                    • making better sales territories;
                    • manage territories and accounts to maximize return on opportunity;
                    • help Sales Professionals to maximize sales and minimize travel frustration.

                    It's quite possible that Inside Sales is on the rise and several of the tools on this page are proof of it. There are still really large opportunities, complex problems, and difficult decisions, which require a visit.

                    By using some of the Field Sales Management software offerings below, companies can help their clients even more.

                     
                     

                    Sales Stack Apps Integration

                    We Use

                    • Zapier – The best apps. Better together
                      If you're reading this and you don't know Zapier already, this might be the biggest find on this entire list. Zapier brings it all together and turns your disparate best-in-class software into a suite on steroids.
                           
                           

                          Live Chat

                           
                           

                          Screenshare, Demoing, Conference Calls

                          We Use

                                Other Tools

                                 
                                 

                                Analytics

                                We Use

                                • Shield App - Real-time LinkedIn Analytics
                                  Before the introduction of Shield App, going through our LinkedIn data was rather difficult if not impossible. Now, we have clear, live, actionable insights for any component we'd like analytics of.

                                Other Tools

                                 
                                 

                                E-Contract & E-Signature

                                What are E-Contract and E-signature Tools?:
                                Sales organizations were put in the world to increase the amount of signed contracts and healthy business relationships with clients. In the past the entire process of "getting them to sign on the line which is dotted" was physical, slow, and cumbersome. E-contract and E-signature tools change this.

                                What makes E-contract and E-signature Tools interesting?:
                                While productivity does play a role, other significant benefits of this section of tools include traceability, auditability, ease of collaboration, and transparency.

                                E-contracting is all about enhancing the customer relationship through improved handling of contractual aspects of the entire customer life cycle.

                                E-signing is more incidental in that it just focuses on each contract's moment of signature.

                                We Use

                                • Oneflow - E-signing is just the beginning
                                  At YourSales Oneflow has become the main tool for managing the contract process. We wanted a tool, which could span the full contract process all the way from creating to sending, tracking, signing and even renewing contracts. 
                                  String collaboration options make it easy and efficient to make changes where needed. Let us know if you'd like a sales tech chat about our use case or reach out to Oneflow.

                                Other Tools

                                 
                                 

                                Phone Systems/Solutions/Dialer

                                 
                                 

                                Team Communication

                                We Use

                                • Slack – Be less busy
                                  We like Slack for channels, private messages and first and foremost for its Zapier integration, which elevates internal communication to a while new level.
                                • Microsoft Teams - Meet, chat, call, and collaborate in just one place
                                  Actually, there isn't much to really like about MS Teams. Except, of course, that it's used by many, many companies all over the World. For companies with just a single Microsoft profile on each machine, Teams is great. In today's Bring-Your-Own-Device reality, though, more often than not multiple MS accounts are present, which can make Teams a fairly painful experience.
                                 
                                 

                                Planning

                                 
                                 

                                Sales/Marketing Alignment

                                 
                                 

                                Video Sales Engagement

                                 
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                                Sales Growth Hacking

                                Before you use the tools in this section, take note of this!!!: These tools should not be used by sales automation novices - guidance highly recommended!
                                The correct use of tools can take you to your desired destination faster. Without proper process many tools can alternatively accelerate and compound the speed and degree with which things go wrong. 
                                The nature of the tools in this category is that they can very quickly take you to a very, very dark place far, far from your desired destination. If you decide to use them, make sure to take advice from an experienced Sales Automation Professional. You've been warned! Read on and use at your own risk.

                                What are Sales Growth Hacking Tools?:
                                With the rise of technology as a core component of sales operations, a subset of very powerful have emerged. These tools mostly take advantage of web technology to automate actions one would have otherwise had to manually execute.

                                What makes Sales Growth Hacking Tools interesting?:
                                It's mostly about productivity, really. Most of these tools carry out actions that any determined individual with plenty of time on their hands would be able to do manually. Here are a few of the potential benefits:

                                • messaging outreach for faster prospecting, recruitment, and list generation;
                                • messaging outreach for quick and targeted distribution of content;
                                • scrape content from website - often social networking sites.

                                How are Sales Growth Hacking tools used?:
                                More often than not sales growth hacking tools come packaged as extensions for Google's Chrome browser. In addition to and alternatively they may exist on entirely separate websites.

                                What's the shortcoming?:
                                Well, it's simple, really. While these tools aren't necessarily technically illegal, many will go counter to the terms and conditions of the services they're built to make use of. Wrong use could lead to temporary or permanent penalties for your access to any of these services. Handle with care!

                                dux-soup

                                Sales Stack Tools Graveyard:



                                What triggered this article is a year-old passion for tools for the sales process along with a question on Quora wiki, which you can find here. The problem in the Quora wiki is that everyone can add and delete content. Competitors would remove each other and add themselves, making the wiki unreliable.

                                Edited and categorized as always by Jakob Thusgaard. Making sure to keep a copy, so this list of tools for the Sales Stack remains as valuable and relevant as possible. Send a message or comment here if you have any problems whatsoever with that.

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