The future of sales technologies lies in expanding your view of revenue generation from just the sales team to all customer-facing functions. As such, sales tech will become revenue tech, which encompasses technologies that span buyer engagement, core workflow applications, sales enablement, sales operations, infrastructure and third-party data.
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What Is the Future of Sales Technologies?
Revenue tech is the new sales tech
Sales organizations have long leveraged technologies to improve the productivity of their sellers but are increasingly focused on improving the entire end-to-end revenue process. To optimize your revenue tech roadmap, first audit the state of your sales tech stack.
Download the revenue tech framework to
- Discover the core technologies driving revenue growth in sales organizations.
- Identify potential gaps in your current sales tech stack.
- Evaluate technologies to address gaps and accelerate your journey towards the ultimate revenue-driving tech stack.
The components of a modern sales tech strategy
Sales and revenue leaders must position their tech strategy as an integrated accelerant, not a parallel initiative, to generate more pipeline, close more deals and expand customer share of wallet even in disrupted conditions. But to do this, first evolve your sales tech strategy into a revenue tech roadmap, which is composed of technologies that support the end-to-end revenue process and is integrated throughout all functions.
- Revenue tech strategy
- Sales tech trends
- Sales tech stack design
To grow in this hypercompetitive and digital B2B buying landscape, you need an aggressive level of tech investment, designed to deliver value, information and products to customers throughout the entire customer life cycle. While sales tech focuses on improving the effectiveness of sellers, a revenue tech strategy is essential to:
- Help buyers and sellers/sales organizations adopt new technology
- Use automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
- Scale up what works and scale down what doesn’t
Growth requires a revenue tech strategy based on three attributes:
Cross-functional alignment: Implement a coalition of executives, operations and business technologist stakeholders to share data, workflows and analytics to optimize how the business is run across systems.
Revenue technology stack: Design a revenue tech stack that delivers outcomes by eliminating mundane technology work, streamlining the workflow needs of customer-facing roles and providing customizable building blocks to meet the needs of each business unit.
Communal data: Develop specific use cases for sharing customer data that provide value to your customer by orchestrating data and workflows throughout the revenue tech stack.
Adopting innovative technologies and practices provides revenue organizations with a competitive edge because it enables new functionality, such as hyperautomation, AI and ML. These functionalities influence some of the core priorities of an organization: pipeline generation, seller execution and account growth.
However, prioritizing technologies to invest in is challenging, especially in this period of “sales tech mayhem,” where the vendor market is moving from a wide set of categories to a narrow list of vendors with wide portfolios of capabilities. Besides auditing the value of your revenue tech stack, the best way to tame the mayhem is to continually monitor technology trends and the vendor landscape, especially as mergers and acquisitions consolidate providers.
An effective revenue tech stack design requires cross-functional collaboration between executive, operations and business technologist stakeholders. The stack integrates organizational priorities throughout sales, marketing and other functions to drive growth with technology vision and investments. A revenue tech roadmap connects the current state with an aspirational future state and dictates how to bridge gaps in people, process, technology and data.
An optimized revenue tech stack is broken into three pillars:
- Technology stack adoption is driven by three factors: user-centric enablement, workflow design and documentation, and vendor management.
- Data management includes the setup of the necessary data quality, governance and orchestration needed to run the end-to-end process, workflows and analytics throughout the stack.
- Tech stack talent refers to the operations, enablement and talent needed to manage the tech stack and deploy advanced technologies, such as automation, AI and ML.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between sales technology and revenue technology?
Sales technologies are largely focused on improving sales execution or automation and increasing sales effectiveness. Key drivers for adopting sales technologies include improvements and innovations in the user experience and end-user engagement, more integration, more adoption and application of predictive and prescriptive analytic insights.
While sales tech focuses on improving the effectiveness of sellers, a broader and more aggressive level of tech investment is necessary to grow revenue. The modern customer-facing organization uses technology to deliver value, information and products to customers throughout the entire customer life cycle. Revenue technologies are a set of solutions, applications and platforms built to automate the end-to-end revenue process.
What is a sales technology stack?
An organization’s sales tech stack is a collection of essential technologies built to automate the revenue process end-to-end. These technologies span engagement, application, sales enablement, sales operations, infrastructure, and third-party data and are the foundation for predictable, efficient growth.
How is technology used in selling?
As selling becomes increasingly virtual, companies are investing more in sales technologies. A recent Gartner poll found chief sales officers expect their sales technology budget and virtual sales headcount to increase by 20% in 2022. The market is growing rapidly and has accelerated exponentially with the rush to virtual selling due to the pandemic and new ways of working. The following technologies are deemed “essential,” considering they support basic fundamentals of selling, regardless of transaction speed and complexity.
- Customer relationship management technology: automates sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities
- Revenue data solutions: composed of market intelligence, account and contact data; enables prioritization of prospect and customer account and contact data using insights and propensity signals, integrated into daily seller workflows
- Video conferencing: creates secure, sensory-rich virtual meetings that are easy for buyers to join and sellers to host
- Partner relationship management: a tool where indirect partners comprise a significant percentage of revenue, equipping resell partners to help end customers through the buying and ownership cycle
- E-sign: faster processing time and lower administrative and storage fees
What is the role of technology in sales?
Sales technologies must support organizations’ goals, such as digital transformation, managing flexible work, and putting buyers and customer experience (CX) at the center of the journey. They must also help mitigate market and economic conditions that are unpredictable and have the potential to upend business processes. Favored sales technologies help organizations mitigate risk, build pipelines and improve revenue outcomes through improved CX. Most recently, there has been a renewed focus on optimization of processes to improve resiliency given economic uncertainty.
How can technology help sales?
Sales technology can help sales in the following ways:
- Improve buyer engagement
- Equip sellers with data that generates situationally aware insights to influence messaging, workflows and tactics
- Simplify day-to-day seller workflows by automating time-consuming tasks (for example, e-sign, sales engagement applications)