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Do you ever feel confused over sales technology tools?
It’s OK if you do – since there are currently 830 products in 38 different categories, according to Nicolas de Kouchkovsky’s annual 2018 Sales Technology Landscape he just shared with us.
He divides it up by five main categories:
- Engagement (internet, e-mail, voice, chat/messaging, social, & in-person)
- Productivity & enablement
- Sales Intelligence
- Pipeline & analytics
- People management
At Score More Sales we are most focused on people, leadership and pipeline, so I’ll share the sub categories today for two of the five main categories - People Management and Pipeline & Analytics:
People Management sub-categories are:
- Onboarding & Training
- Sales Coaching
- Sales Appraisal
- Incentives & Commissions
- Sales Territory Management
Pipeline & Analytics sub-categories are:
- Pipeline Management (CRM)
- Forecasting & Performance Management
- Speech & Conversation Analytics
- Price Optimization & Revenue Management
- Data Visualization
- Predictive Analytics
- Account-based Planning
My questions for sales leaders, which will be posted in LinkedIn, are:
- do you go about selecting technology tools based on need or based on someone saying that your team needs to try a specific tool?
- Do you have a plan for evaluating and selecting technology tools?
- Who oversees the plan?
- How do you leverage these massive data support tools along with great human capabilities?
One of the first thoughts that came to my mind when I saw this chart was how glad I am to see organizations like the non-profit, member-driven Sales Enablement Society building and scaling to help sales enablement professionals, Sales Operations, Sales and those within the sales team to have a coordinated plan of sorts for growing revenues through the use of the right tools. More importantly beyond choosing a tool is how it fits into your own sales ecosystem – how are leaders trained on them, how are they rolled out to leaders – and how easy is it to measure success with them? These are real issues that need to be discussed in our sales teams and in the C-suite as needed.
Lori Richardson helps mid-sized companies grow revenues by solving key issues in their sales department - like recruiting, retention, diversity hiring, process, pipeline and leadership. She speaks at CEO groups on topics of sales growth. Clients include companies in the technology, telecom, manufacturing, distribution, and professional services industries. Subscribe to the award-winning blog, follow her on Twitter
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