Has your organization rolled out a ton of new technology and widgets to your sales people who are now overwhelmed with all the new stuff and ever evolving reports and information from all the "support team" (account management, product, etc)? What solutions have you tried to help aggregate the various selling tools, reports, apps, and "knowledge hubs" that contain information for sellers? What worked and didn't work?
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Head of Corporate Development in Software7 months ago
Unfortunately, yes we have. I believe the last State of Sales Report from Salesforce said that on average, reps have 10 tools to support their processes. I find that more tools to aggregate makes the problem worse, not better. As these tools begin to develop/acquire overlapping functionality, look for opportunities to consolidate. Make a list of the most adopted tools in the stack to the least. Begin to eliminate on the basis of need. Ultimately, you'll be making a choice on what tools get used, because those are the tools that will get you the data/insights you need. Director of Sales and Business Development in Software7 months ago
I've kind of run into the opposite problem.Being at a startup with limited resources, we can't go out and get every piece of tech we would like and some of our sales team is having trouble adapting to the limited resources.
Senior Enterprise Account Manager in IT Services6 months ago
I think this is often the case if your team grows very fast or if you have some internal changes. Everyone is used to things differently and therefore they use their tools. As already mentioned at this stage it is important to look at the sales process and dive deep what actions can be combined and which tools are suitable for that. But as a second thing it is most important to take the people with you. With all optimizations you have to have the human in mind, if the changes bring them time, freedom or simplicity they are also willing to go with the change. Third and last one i want to mentioned that you have to know what your tools can do before you buy something new. Seems simple but i saw it often that there are 2 or 3 tools in use which also can be handled in one tool that already has been in place but no one has known this before.VP of Sales in Software6 months ago
Tools are extremely important to work efficiently. Not having the right reports and insights is like a plane without a cockpit - you are flying blind. I know that too many tools are annoying and overwhelming, but sales teams need to make use of the technology that we have to be competitive. Of course, they should spend their time selling and not working all day with the tools but not making use of them is a big mistake.
What I typically do is go back to my sales process. What are the steps we take to go from prospecting to close? Where are our current tools helping? ARE they helping? Often times we'll find overlap and money wasted on redundant tech.
Have a great RevOps team also helps, they don't always like being the police, but they do a great job of it. The biggest thing I've learn from them is that they are able to really govern how everything integrates and interactions.
Reports are great when they can all be found in 1 spot (like a Salesforce dashboard) but all the data is funnelled in from every tool in the stack.