Finding success in sales is certainly part personality — but scaling sales success requires support from modern tools and techniques that help your team get more done without sacrificing the thoughtful, personalized experience that sets your business apart.
In this guide, we’ll walk sales leaders through how to level-up sales team performance through foundational tooling that helps with task management, sourcing B2B data, verifying email addresses to keep you above board, and more.
And stay tuned as we wrap up with techniques like tackling sales objections, nailing down target personas, empowering sales and marketing collaboration, and more — which will enable you to launch off of that technical foundation and take sales to new heights.
10 Sales Tools to Bolster Team Performance
In this section, we’ve highlighted some lesser-known but powerful tools for improving team-wide productivity regarding some of the most important sales jobs.
Sales Task Management Platform
Sales task management platforms are purpose-built to help sales teams keep track of all the important steps, meetings, and other “to-dos” on the way to closing complex deals.
Kanban Zone is a task management platform built to follow the famous Kanban methodology developed by Toyota in the 1940s. This tool balances basic to-do lists and complicated project management software to provide a formidable yet easy-to-use collaboration tool that boosts team-wide productivity.
Take advantage of multiple board views, templates that work across devices, and a host of organizational and operational features to measure and optimize sales collaboration, workflows, and effectiveness. To help sales teams get the hang of its flexible, no-code interface even faster, Kanban Zone offers coaching and training services.
Smartsheet is another task management tool that sales teams can use to track workload, visualize workflows and project progress, automate to-do items, and collaborate across other business teams and tools through tech stack integrations.
Customer Relationship Management Tooling
The right customer relationship management (CRM) tooling will assist your sales teams in tracking customer and lead interactions to grow relationships.
Nimble is one CRM that’s especially focused on relationship building. Through integration with the sales tools you already use (email, social, etc.), contact unification and enrichment, and workflow management — sales teams can use Nimble to deepen their business connections.
Nutshell is another great CRM option for sales teams. Sales pros can use this tool for everything from lead collection to email marketing, sales task automation, lead pipeline management, and of course, reporting and analytics to view and improve the performance of it all.
Marketing Automation Technology
Marketing automation technology takes the manual labor out of simple and repetitive marketing operations, so your team can focus on the work that requires human ingenuity.
Creatio helps sales teams automate various processes, such as gathering and scoring leads, building a full-fledged profile of each customer, segmenting audiences based on demographics and behavior, and developing personalized marketing campaigns to accelerate time to revenue.
Insider automatically connects consumer data from various channels to create complete profiles, applies artificial intelligence (AI) to predict what they want and where they’ll go next, and brings that information together to create custom experiences that generate conversions.
B2B Database
Sales teams need robust B2B databases to supplement their knowledge about prospects and customers to target just-right audiences with just-right messaging.
ZoomInfo is a multi-faceted platform for revenue teams. One of its most powerful features is its database, where sales pros can get accurate B2B contact data from phone numbers and email addresses to education, work experience, and much more.
Seamless.ai provides a unique real-time search engine that delivers accurate B2B contact information, data enrichment, pipeline generation, and even smart technology that helps craft winning pitches.
Email Verification Software
Email verification software, which confirms whether email addresses are accurate and active, is invaluable for sales teams who can’t afford to have their domain blacklisted due to “spammy” activity such as sending a high rate of emails that bounce — no matter how accidental it is.
NeverBounce is one of the most trusted email verification and cleaning solutions, with up to 99.9% deliverability. Real-time email verification, bulk email list cleaning, and automatic list cleaning ensure sales teams always work with high-quality contact information and avoid getting flagged as spammers.
Proofy is email verifying software promising up to 98.5% deliverability by checking single emails, bulk email address lists, and on-site forms for disposable emails, duplicate emails, role-based emails, and other high-risk emails.
Looking for even more powerful tools to optimize sales and marketing team processes and performance? Don’t miss our guide: 11 Tools For Sales and Marketing Teams.
5 Techniques to Further Advance Sales Success
With the above platforms in your sales toolbelt, here are several techniques to round out your mission of achieving major sales success.
Apply Tooling and Automation to Prioritize High-Earning Sales Activities
Shockingly, sales reps spend less than 30% of their time closing sales.
You can drive more revenue by enabling sales teams to focus on the activities that generate sales.
The first part of this strategy is identifying which activities are the most productive for your sales team. This identification process will vary by company. Cold outbounding may be the most productive for some while following up on lead email threads might be the most effective for other teams.
The second part is giving sales the time and space to do these things by taking other tasks off their plates. This is where automation and technology come in. The great news is, we just provided a long list of the types of tech and the specific tools that can help you complete this step!
Get Sales and Marketing on the Same Page
Marketing is a major source of sales leads.
But when marketing and sales aren’t on the same page regarding which leads are ideal and how to qualify them, sales can waste a lot of time tracking down missing lead information and going after people who aren’t a great fit.
To achieve more success with leads, sales and marketing must collaborate.
Here are some critical actions these teams can take to achieve alignment:
- Strategize together: Sales and marketing must come together when defining personas, creating messaging, setting up lead qualification scoring, and other foundational sales and marketing tasks that impact win rate and the customer experience.
- Share goals and accountability: Sales and marketing should also work together when building goals and success metrics, so they can share the responsibility and lift each other toward those objectives.
- Work within the same funnel: Both teams should work from the same funnel and software platforms to create transparency in lead sourcing and management.
Develop Tactics for Overcoming Sales Objections
Any experienced sales rep has come up against sales objections. A program for addressing these is critical to overcoming them — and closing more deals.
Here are some practices your sales team can exercise when they butt up against objections:
- Don’t ignore concerns; acknowledge and validate them to open up a healthy dialogue.
- Ask follow-up questions for elaboration. This practice will help reps determine if the objection is something they can overcome — timing, pricing, etc. — or if it’s truly not a good fit.
- Reposition concerns from another stakeholder’s point of view with phrases like “What concerns does your CEO have?” This repositioning allows leads to overcome worries about confrontation and get their unfiltered fears out on the table, where you can address them.
Tighten Up Your Target Personas
A buyer persona is a fictitious character based on the real leads your company attracts — or wants to attract.
It’s important to develop tight target personas for several reasons. One, when sales knows which existing leads fall into their ideal audience, they can avoid wasting time and hone in on wowing and converting the right folks. And two, understanding the person to whom you’re talking gives you insight into their role and personality, so you know just what to say to motivate action.
Here are the core elements a detailed target persona should have:
- Demographics: age, location, name, etc.
- Firmographics: company industry and size, role, responsibilities, etc.
- Pain points: major workplace stressors, major personal stressors, business threats, etc.
- Purchasing motivators: personal motivations (promotion), business motivations (lead their industry through modernization), etc.
- Their toolbox: competing tech they already have, complicated tech they want to replace, etc.
- Preferred content consumption channels: social media, email marketing, search engine ads, etc.
Grow Retention and Performance with Improved Team Management Skills
Finally, sales leaders should turn an eye to themselves to ensure they’ve developed the right team management skills to increase employee performance and loyalty.
We think these are some of the most important sales leadership skills:
- Emotional intelligence: Emotional intelligence is a critical tool for understanding your sales team on a deeper level and developing the self-awareness and self-management many leaders lack. When you know what influences your decision-making, you can balance those factors to ensure you make equitable and wise moves across your sales team. Emotionally-intelligent leaders are also more adept at detecting upset and stress within their teams and more likely to be able to get to the root of these issues to keep the team strong and functional.
- Problem-solving: Few things are more frustrating than working under a leader uncomfortable with or slow at solving problems — leaving reps in limbo and sacrificing sales while they hem and haw. Being able to solve problems at the pace of sales is less about knowing everything and more about trusting your experience, going with your gut, and having processes in place to pivot as you grow your knowledge.
- Continual learning: Speaking of growing your knowledge, it’s one of the most overlooked yet important tasks a leader can pursue. When a leader gets smarter, so does their team and its processes. Embarking upon continuous learning isn’t only about getting smarter; it’s about setting a precedent for your team that growth and change aren’t scary — they represent greater opportunity.
Where Will You Start Optimizing Your Sales Processes?
We get it. It can be quite daunting to look at a guide like this and figure out where to even begin tackling new sales tools and techniques.
Most of these tools have free trials so you can try out their capabilities without having to commit early on. See what works, and double down on those that do.
Sales is a never ending process of experimentation.
