Legacy Sales Tech Vs. The Modern Sales Team

Millennials now represent the majority of decision-makers. With this new cohort of decision-makers comes a new set of expectations that blur the lines between consumer and business purchases.

Millennial buyers have a strong preference for digital interactions across an abundance of channels and expect immediate, high value, personalized responses. This creates buyer-seller interactions that are more frequent, less formal, involve larger buying committees, and are taking place across more channels including virtual meetings, social networks, and text, Slack, or WhatsApp messages.

Evolving buyer demographics and preferences have collided with legacy sales technologies — consisting of point solutions and CRM databases — leaving the average buyer frustrated and the average seller struggling to achieve quota. CRM was never designed to capture or provide actionable insights from the massive volume of sales data generated from the email exchanges, sales calls, and meetings happening in every deal.

With these limitations, sellers are forced to rely on their ‘gut instincts’ and managers spend almost half of their critical 1:1 time with sellers trying to understand the health of their pipeline, rather than coaching on how to better engage deals and build stronger pipeline.

These examples highlight the pervasive lack of visibility and insights needed to make informed decisions, leaving sellers unequipped to effectively anticipate buyer needs and deliver valuable interactions that drive strong pipeline and revenue. Point solutions emerged as a means to solve critical tasks throughout the sales process. By definition, most of these tools focus on just one job to be done or one problem a revenue organization faces.

This forces sales leaders to stitch together several, often costly, tools to address all of their needs. Now, there are thousands of point solutions adding to the noise of disparate tools for connected problems.

Out of all of the sales tech point solutions out there, in The Forrester Tech Tide™: Sales Technologies, Q1 2021, Forrester identified several subcategories that sales organizations should invest in. Four of these categories — conversational intelligence, customer success, revenue intelligence, and sales engagement — all have one thing in common. Each of these technologies empowers sales organizations to execute critical tasks that deliver exceptional buyer experiences and business results. While these tools individually solve an important moment along the buyer and seller journey, challenges arise when organizations try stitching them together.

These challenges hinder organizations from reaching their full potential.

Would you like some guidance on how to navigate past these challenges and put your sales organization on the path to modern B2B sales success? Schedule a complimentary strategy session with one of your sales technology experts and they'll make sure to get you pointed in the right direction.