The ‘Sales Tech Stack’ and its’ impact on sales leadership
The ever growing ‘sales tech stack’ needed to support high performing sales teams and modern selling has made the sales leaders job both easier and infinitely more complex.
Today’s sales leader needs to be a combination of a sales coach, a technology whizz, a juggling artist and a time travelling genius.
They need to be able to drive high performing teams, drawing knowledge and intelligence from multiple technology platforms.
The modern sales leaders job is as much business analyst as it is coaching and leadership in today’s complex sales world. If we look at a typical sales team today, they are likely to be using a combinations of:
CRM (Saleforce / Hubspot / Dynamics)
BI / Performance Management Tools
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Call listening & intelligence (Gong / Refract)
Outreach / sequencing tools (Salesloft / Outreach)
Learning Management Systems
Comms platforms (TEAMs or Slack)
HR (Workday / Ultipro)
Document Management & Storage
Whiteboards & Excel
OneNote for 1-2-1 meetings
Whilst all of these platforms and technologies are hugely valuable in their own right in the task of performing a sales job, they present a challenge for sales leaders.
How do I aggregate all the data I have across these disparate systems to frame and drive a coaching conversation?
In order to a) get the best out of the technologies and in turn b) the best out of our sales teams, we need to be able to correlate activity, behaviours and performance improvements.
For example…
My SDR team have just attended a Social Selling Master class [Via the Learning Management Solution (LMS)]
I have set an objective for them to update their LinkedIn Profile and start engaging [via email]
I have set them a target to increase their Sales Navigator prospecting [Whiteboard]
The goal is to increase our response rate from LinkedIn to drive meetings.
As a leader, to do this I have:
An excel sheet or dashboard from the LMS on who has attended each course
A note in my calendar to check LinkedIn profiles
A whiteboard with InMail targets Vs daily totals (written up by each rep)
A report in CRM tracking meetings booked
As a leader, I do not have any visibility of:
Whether each individual has completed their objective on their LinkedIn profile
The impact the training course has had on the LinkedIn SSI (Social Selling Index) Score for those who attended
A benchmark of SSI scores across the team to see who has updated their profile fully
A comparison and benchmark of #InMails Vs #InMail acceptances and whether this has improved since the training
A correlation between InMail acceptances and meetings booked
Analysis by individual and team against the ‘Social Selling’ and ‘Prospecting’ competencies defined for my team
What’s working and what is not
In summary, I simply do not have the complete picture. I have blindspots all over the place and it is impacting my ability to identify coaching opportunities and success metrics across the team. It is impacting my ability to identify peer learning opportunities and where further training is required.
In addition, I cannot get a clear ROI on either the training investment or our use of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
As sales leaders, we need to recognise the value of each distinct solution in our tech stack but we also need to have a central place where all of the valuable intelligence is brought together and can be used to drive coaching and improvement.
e4enable collects every important metric in one place to focus coaching and development and assess the impact on outcomes and attribution of efforts. It creates a consistent picture across sales leadership, sales enablement, sales operations and sales reps. Take a look at how you can place continual performance improvement at the heart of your sales teams across your tech stack.
