2020 TOP SALESTECH
This exciting guide showcases 23 of the hottest sales tools for 2020. They help with closing deals, enabling sales, and more.
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TOP SALESTECH 2020
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AN INSIDE LOOK INTO THE TECHNOLOGY WE THINK SHOULD BE IN YOUR SALES STACK
Smart Selling Tools • Top Sales Tools of 2020
WHAT IS THE TOP SALES TOOL GUIDE?
I’ve enjoyed analyzing the marketplace for Sales Software for ten years now. Watching it blossom from 53 solutions (listed in my first report) to more than 600 on my latest Nancy Nardin SalesTech Landscape has been exciting.
However, the growth in the market has brought confusion. Sales organizations rarely have the resources to adequately keep up on all the tech – nor should they have to try. It’s more important to understand which challenges need solving and in what order.
It’s with great pleasure that I get to feature my favorite solutions in our annual Top Sales Tools of the Year Guides. Because you’re looking to solve challenges, rather than memorize market categories, we’ve grouped this year’s honorees by the type of objective they can help you achieve.
You’ll find recognizable vendor names along with a sprinkling of up-and-comers. I’ve no doubt that you’ll find one or more solutions to ignite your imagination on what’s possible for your sales organization.
Sincerely,
Nancy Nardin
Founder & CEO | Smart Selling Tools
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Smart Selling Tools •
Top Sales Tools of 2020
CLOSING DEALS
Many factors go into a seller's ability to close deaIs. It starts with making sure you're selling to the right people to begin with. While you could argue that every solution can help a rep close deals, the solution we've chosen is fundamental to the process.
In this guide, we’ve honored vendors in one specific solution category
- Reference Management
Making it easy for salespeople to introduce their buyers to existing customer references can help close deals. Buyers value holding an authentic conversation with an existing customer to validate their perceptions or to uncover last minute concerns. Make it easy for reps to find the perfect reference while avoiding burdening any one customer with too many requests.
How important is Reference Management to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Smart Selling Tools •
Top Sales Tools of 2020
ENABLING SALES
Both Marketing and Product Marketing teams have a vested interest in the sales function, making sure that sellers have current, compliant content and that they know the right messaging. Traditionally, this has been accomplished with static battle-cards and document/file-folder sharing tools like Dropbox or Box.
Sellers spend a great deal of time creating their account and opportunity plans, mapping out the right stake-holders and their objectives, identifying white-spaces (which products have and have not yet been purchased within each account). Often this information is locked up in PowerPoint™ documents, or Excel™ spreadsheets.
In this guide, we’ve honored more modern, convenient, and effective tools vendors in three categories
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Sales Enablement & Content Management
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Opportunity & Key Account Management
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Customer Value: Definition, Communication and Creation
Sales Enablement & Content Management
Sales Enablement solutions typically offer functionality to store, organize, and serve-up content for sellers within their CRM or email clients. This makes it possible for salespeople to easily compile documents, presentations, or videos they want to share with each prospect. Often, content can be mapped, or “tagged” to each stage in the sales cycle, and/or to buyer personas or industries.
This makes it more likely that the right content will be shared with buyers at the right time to improve the reps’ ability to move deals through the pipeline to a close.
Most Sales Enablement solutions provide a ‘portal-like’ interface for salespeople to find the information and assets they need.
How important is Sales Enablement to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Opportunity & Key Account Management
These types of solutions help sellers identify opportunities for growth inside key accounts and execute a plan to capture that growth. They often include such functionality as mapping buyer stake-holders into organizational charts, aligning buyer objectives to your offerings, specifying stake-holder sentiment, and automatic grading of likelihood to purchase based on which tasks or processes have and have not been achieved.
These solutions will help sellers keep track of the many moving parts in each opportunity and ensure that balls don’t get dropped so deals progress smoothly to a close.
How important is Key Account Management to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Customer Value: Definition, Communication and Creation
Every prospect or customer is motivated by their own unique business objectives. To close deals, Salespeople need to articulate how their solutions impact the customer financially. Tools in this category enable an organization to improve how they define, communicate, plan, deliver and measure differentiated customer OUTCOMES. These OUTCOMES should be organized around a construct of customer challenge, solution story and financial impact
How important is Customer Value to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
ENGAGING
LEADS & PROSPECTS
Smart Selling Tools •
Top Sales Tools of 2020
ENGAGING LEADS & PROSPECTS
Engagement is the second most important level in the Hierarchy of Sales (first is knowing “Who to Sell to and Why”). It requires more and more attempts per contact to make a connection than ever before. Buyers resist outreach until they have already recognized a need and have done a fair amount of research.
As a result, sellers need more targeted and effective ways to nurture prospects and to get buyers to engage.
In this guide, we’ve honored vendors in five specific categories
- Sequenced Outreach
- Conversation Optimization
- High-Volume Engagement Platforms
- Video Engagement
- Personalization
Two factors are impacted by these types of solutions. First, is the ability to leverage templates for emails and voicemails and the second is the ability to set-up automated sequences that leverage best-practices for the number and variety of attempts.
Salespeople can activate an outreach playbook for each prospect to ensure consistent and persistent contact attempts. Sequences need to be interrupted or altered when prospects respond. Therefore, tracking and alerts are built-in to the process as well as auto-ceasing of the sequence upon a response.
How important are Sequenced Outreach solutions to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Conversation Optimization Platforms
This category is focused on gaining better outcomes from actual sales conversations. You can easily set up playbooks for different scenarios to guide salespeople with the right topics and questions, based on your own unique sales methodology. Think of it as a personal assistant to your conversations. Great for onboarding and reinforcement.
How important are Conversation Optimization platforms to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
High-Volume Engagement Platforms
Complete engagement platforms offer dialers, voicemail drop, auto-logging into Salesforce – even texting. Salespeople get a prioritized view of each day’s sales activities, reps begin every day knowing exactly who to contact and how based on your pre-set sales playbook. Sequence makes salespeople faster and more efficient. Integrations with online meetings and calendaring tools reduce the back and forth between multiple apps. With auto-syncing to Salesforce, manual recording of activities by salespeople is virtually eliminated meaning much more time for actual selling.
How important are Engagement platforms to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Video can humanize a salesperson from being ‘just’ a voice at the other end of the phone. Sending a video message can open doors. They personalize the message and convert the outreach from seeming cold, to feeling warm and sincere. Video email campaigns that automate video personalization and track engagement make it scalable. Personalized landing pages with personal pitches add to a great buyer experience.
How important is Video Engagement to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Personalized outreach converts exponentially higher than canned messages. Personalization includes understanding prospects’ personality, interests, and topics, and finding relevant and interesting news you can share with them. These types of solutions make it possible to send personalized outreach at scale driving better prospecting outcomes.
Alternative types of personalization, like Turtl, allow you to send customized and beautifully crafted content that converts no matter the sales stage.
How important is Personalization to your business
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Smart Selling Tools •
Top Sales Tools of 2020
FIELD SALES ENGAGEMENT
With all the talk about Inside sales and the critical role of SDRs (Sales Development Reps), we shouldn’t forget about those on the frontlines! Our field sales reps need tools that will help them optimize client and prospect visits, and to organize their daily follow-ups.
Those that meet prospects at tradeshows and events have their own unique needs for scanning business cards or badges, accessing content on-the-fly on mobile devices, logging conversation results and next steps, and for sending fast follow-up.
We’ve honored a solution in one category of field sales engagement
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Tradeshows & Mobile Presentations
Tradeshow & Mobile Presentations
The ability to scan business cards and badges, have the data entered automatically into both CRM and your marketing automation system are key to higher tradeshow ROI. It’s about speed to lead follow-up as well as added insight. Salespeople can easily access and present content on their mobile device, add content to “shopping carts” to immediately send to the prospect (and log to CRM). Adding notes and ticking off boxes on a conversation disposition form provides needed insight to distribute the lead to the right rep and to have them follow-up faster and with more targeted messaging.
How important are Tradeshow & Mobile Presentation platforms to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Smart Selling Tools •
Top Sales Tools of 2020
MANAGEMENT & REPORTING
Sales Management, operations, and reporting activities can take up a lot of time. Fortunately, there are options for making these tasks easier AND more productive.
While activities like coaching reps are under a separate heading (Upskilling Reps), there are plenty other activities that fall within this category, most notably, sales performance optimization, quota assignment, and commissions design/ administration.
In this guide, we’ve honored vendors in one type of management and reporting solution category
- Sales Performance Management
Sales Performance Management
These solutions provide added capabilities to your existing pipeline and sales reporting to easily compare metric goals to actual performance. AI can identify the most important metrics and skills based on impact to revenue. Comparing reps with scoring analytics reveals and predicts the future revenue potential of each team member. Know why team members will likely fall behind so you can coach and train in time to change the outcome.
How important is Sales Performance Management to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
NANCY NARDIN TOP SALES | TOOL OF THE YEAR 2020
Smart Selling Tools •
Top Sales Tools of 2020
TARGETING ACCOUNTS
The most important, fundamental need of a salesperson is to make sure they’re calling on the right people at the right accounts. We refer to it as the “Who to Call and Why” level of the sales hierarchy.
Mastering the who & why is what dictates how much waste you’ll have in your entire sales process. When you add prospects who aren’t likely to buy to a salesperson’s lead list, you ensure there will be wasted effort and activities, and that waste will now permeate the entire funnel stages – follow-up, outreach, and closing.
In this guide, we’ve honored three vendors in one solution category
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Account & Purchase Intent Identification
Account & Purchase Intent Identification
Most companies will benefit from having a well-defined list of target accounts. Target accounts are those that met your ideal customer profile (ICP). However, just because an account is likely to buy, doesn’t mean they will buy ‘now’. The best account targeting solutions will help you know who’s likely to buy now and why that’s the case. This is referred to as ‘purchase intent’. It’s now possible for salespeople to know which prospects in your ICP intend to purchase.
How important is Account & Purchase Intent Identification to your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
Smart Selling Tools •
Top Sales Tools of 2020
UPSKILLING REPS
A lot has been said about the top 20% of reps, the bottom 20% and the middle 60%. If you can up-skill the middle performing reps to they perform like the top, it can have a significant impact on your revenue.
You do that by way of better coaching and onboarding and by offering continuous learning and practice platforms. We’ve grouped those activities into Skills Development & Reinforcement.
In this guide, we’ve honored five vendors in two solutions categories
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Skills Development & Reinforcement
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Conversation Intelligence
Skills Development & Reinforcement
It’s hard for Managers to know who and when a salesperson needs coaching if they don’t have the tools to identify where improvement is needed.
Learning exercises and scenarios offer salespeople the chance to acquire new, and to perfect existing skills. Built-in quizzes, learning resources, practice and feedback functionalities are offered in quick, digestible formats for no-excuse learning on the go. Analytics tell managers which reps are progressing and how the learning exercises are impacting revenue.
How important is Skills Development & Reinforcement for your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
Conversation Intelligence
If you want to know what works on sales calls, you have to know what’s being said on sales calls. Conversation Intelligence solutions record, analyze, transcribe, and even produce a list of next steps for each sales call. You’ll learn which reps need coaching and in what way (What’s the ratio of rep-to-customer talk-time? Are they answering questions with the right information? Do they use too many filler words? Are they bringing up price too early?) You’ll also learn which competitors are mentioned most often, and other insight that can lead to better product marketing. I like that recordings can be used in onboarding to show new reps best-practice examples and that they can also be shared with customers.
How important are Conversation Intelligence platforms for your business?
- Very Important
- Somewhat Important
- Neutral
- Not important
