It’s trendy to talk about sales stacks right now. Hundreds of sales leaders showed up to celebrate the topic at today’s Sales Stack conference to prove it.
But beyond being able to keep up with buzz around the topic, where can all of this sales stack talk really take you? And how can you optimize your stack? These four panelists took the stage at today’s event to offer some answers:
- Nancy Nardin, CEO, Smart Selling Tools
- Jim Keenan, CEO, A Sales Guy
- Richard Harris, Founder, The Harris Consulting Group
- Mukund Mohan, Director, Microsoft Ventures
Based on what we learned from them, we developed a quick list of questions for you. Our goal? To get you to look at your sales stack from a few new angles. Let’s go.
5 Questions We Have About Your Sales Stack
1. Are you experimenting enough?
As Keenan pointed out, many sales cultures do not promote failure. Don’t be one of them. Try out sales tools. Screw up. Learn from it. This is the only way to find out what you and your reps really need.
2. Have you considered a BYOA approach?
Whose job is it to evaluate sales tools for your team? One theme at today’s conference includes empowering reps with greater involvement in enablement decisions. This should apply when evaluating technology, too. Give your reps the chance to bring their own apps to the table for you to evaluate and them to use. Mukund calls it a “Bring Your Own Apps” model.
3. Is your sales stack your own?
Nancy started the session by admitting that she spent a few days trying to come up with a diagram of a sales stack. She gave up. “It looks different for everyone, depending on what size company you have,” she said. And she’s right. While other companies’ sales stacks can serve as great examples for you, yours should be your own.
4. Do you have the right mindset when bringing on tools?
“Start with, ‘what am I trying to get done?’ ” Keenan said of evaluating sales tools. “If you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, you’re going to grab the wrong tool.”
5. Are you making reps better?
“The goal of most of the startups that I see or talk to is that everybody has 1-3 objections…it’s better, faster, cheaper,” Richard said. Don’t use your stack to go straight for faster and cheaper without ensuring that you’re truly enabling reps to sell better.
