What is sales tech?

Sales tech, or sales technology, refers to the digital tools that help sales teams improve productivity and conversion, so they can focus on making sales. These tools help by automating administrative tasks (like data entry, scheduling, or research) or simplifying sales tasks (like making calls or emails).

You might sometimes see the term “sales tech” confused with “sales automation” or “sales enablement”, but these aren’t the same thing.

Sales automation is the process of automating certain steps in your sales funnel. It’s an outcome of using sales tech.

Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the resources, content, and information they need to increase sales. It's the goal of using sales tech.

What does sales tech stack mean?

Your “sales tech stack” refers to all of the digital tools or software your sales team uses to do their job. This covers everything from time management to data tracking and reporting, right down to emailing or chatting. If your sales team uses it, it’s part of the tech stack.

Knowing what’s in your sales tech stack, and how it works together, is important when considering new technologies.

Types of Sales Tech

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Sales Prospecting Tools
Lead Enrichment Tools
Call Tracking and Call Analytics
Outreach/ Email Platforms
Scheduling Software
Video Chat and Screen-Sharing Tools
Live Chat
Sales Reporting Tools
Project Management Tools

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

What it is:

At its most basic, a CRM is software that organizes all of your interactions, communications, and data about your customers. That means all purchases, payments, quotes, calls, emails, chats, agent notes, etc. in one place.

But a CRM isn’t just a database. It acts as a dynamic dashboard that lets you track leads across the entire sales lifecycle (and beyond).

Many CRMs go even further, using the data to give insights like lead scoring, segmentation, forecasting, and sales reports.

Why you need it:

Provides a single source-of-truth for customer data to your sales, marketing, and service teams.

Removes the need to manually track calls, emails, chats, etc.

Allows sales agents to quickly access a customer's sales activity and purchase history.

Gives you the ability to scale your sales processes.

Good vs. Great:

A good CRM will automate the collection and organization of your customer data. A great CRM will act as a platform for your other sales tech, integrating all of your business data in one central location.

Examples

HubSpot CRM
Salesforce

2. Sales Prospecting Tools

What it is:

Prospecting tools are software that automate the process of finding and qualifying leads.

Some prospecting tools do this by gathering information about visitors to your website. Others pull demographic data from social media sites like LinkedIn or Twitter. Still, others build an internal database by scraping public and private data.

You can then sort and filter these potential leads by whatever criteria are important to you– company size, geography, behavior, etc.

Why you need it:

Eliminates the need to manually hunt for prospects (and their contact info).

Discovers prospects you may otherwise have not considered.

Flag engaged leads by behavior (such as website viewership).

Good vs. Great:

Good prospecting tools help you build a prospect list, complete with contact info. Great prospecting tools use AI to unearth similar leads based on your ideal customer profile.

Examples

HubSpot Sales Leads (included in Sales Hub free and above)
LinkedIn Sales Navigator

3. Lead Enrichment Tools

What it is:

Lead enrichment tools find the missing pieces of your prospect lists or CRM contacts. They do that by crawling the web and building databases of job titles, email addresses, phone numbers, etc.

Some enrichment tools will go even further, providing information like what technology a prospect uses, company revenue, funding history, headcount, etc. This is especially useful for those who do account-based sales, where you need to focus on specific attributes.

When you connect your CRM or prospect list to the lead enrichment tool, it will compare your existing contact lists against their known information.

Why you need it:

Flesh out the demographic and firmographic data of your contact lists.
No more scouring the web to try to find contact information.
Helps identify key decision makers.

Good vs. Great:

Good enrichment tools will update their database regularly. Great enrichment tools connect to your CRM to automatically update your contact lists regularly.

Examples