Sales Tech: What is it + What does your team really need?

The days of manual sales outreach are dead. Sales tech is its pallbearer. The same goes for tracking customers in spreadsheets, blindly sending email follow ups, and begging to be connected to a decision maker.

And that’s something to celebrate. Only 34% of an average sales agent’s time is spent actually selling. The rest is spent on things like data entry, prospecting, and scheduling. Sales technology aims to fix that by streamlining- or even automating- many of the tedious tasks that keep you from selling.

But with so many tools and services available, how do you know what your sales team really needs? Below, we’ve covered 10 of the most useful types of sales tech, along with what they do and why you’d need them. But first, let’s start at the top…

What is sales tech? What does sales tech stack mean? 10 Types of Sales Tech

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.

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

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

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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.

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