J12 Commercial Excellence Playbook —Building a Lean Sales Tool Stack
Part 6/10
All good software and technology companies invest in internal technology stacks. A robust tech stack with automated workflows will keep your commercial efforts on track with clear priorities and optimal timing for follow-ups, all leading to a sleek pipeline with higher conversion rates. At early stages you need to be selective in what tools you license and integrate, as you want to stay mean and lean for as long as possible. There is no shortage of technological sales and marketing tools, and as comparing these is a rather daunting experience, I have narrowed down some of the must-haves for building a lean yet robust sales and marketing stack as you scale.
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What is a Sales & Marketing Stack?
A sales and marketing stack is a collection of programs, interfaces, infrastructure and software that streamline and systemise processes whilst collecting valuable insights around your customers journeys, touchpoints with your team, and product. When building your tech stack you should think of it as a literal stack of tools standing next to the model of the traditional sales funnel. At the top, you have the potential customers becoming aware of your product — lead-gen, prospecting and engagement. You then have potential customers considering your product — customer relationship management (CRM) platform. At the end of the funnel are the customers in the decision phase — tracking, reporting and maximizing predictable revenue. And at last the customer success platforms — driving NRR.
There is a tool for everything but the following are my recommendations when it comes to the staples that make up a well-designed sales and marketing stack starting with tools for Lead Gen / Sales Prospecting, CRM, followed by RevOps and ending with Customer Success Platforms. This list has been curated through direct experience, portfolio company feedback and broader views from peers in technology companies.
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Lead Gen / Sales Prospecting / Sales Engagement
These top-of-the-funnel tools work to automatically generate leads, close deals and amplify outreach capabilities by scraping data from online channels like social media, landing pages and email. Rather than wasting time following cold trails, these tools keep your commercial force focused on the highest value leads and the prospects likely to end up becoming customers. Quite similar in terms of features and functionality, sales prospecting tools also automate the process of defining potential customers, allowing one to curate targeting criteria based on perceived ICP profiles and buyer Personas.
The following are some of the Lead-Gen and Sales Prospecting tools which I would recommend, the majority of these offer free trials prior to jumping in on licensing a solution.
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Positioned as a Sales Intelligence and Engagement Platform, Apollo is a great piece of software to amplify sales outreach by providing a suite of tools that help you contact, connect, engage and convert the right personas and stakeholders from within your ICP target prospects.
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Outreach has long been a top performer in sales execution via its innovative AI-driven software solution. It is used amongst leading SaaS companies to help unlock faster sales cycles and imbed a more predictable and automated process to sales outreach and lead nurturing.
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Salesloft is a great starting-off solution for SMBs looking to adopt affordable, effective sales engagement software to support its processes. It is focused on improving conversion rates, driving higher response rates with prospects and ultimately enabling you to close more sales deals.
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Zoominfo is a data intelligence software providing access to millions of B2B leads for sales prospecting and engagement. It claims to have over 220M contacts, profiled with key contact fields such as email address, phone number, Company Type or Industry, Exact Address or General Location, SIC, EIN & More Codes.
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Ripe is a neat tool that integrates with your customer digital sales journey and intercepts prospects in real-time, either routing them to a sales rep in the moment or steering them to a call for action, e.g. demo, in a slick and seamless native experience for the prospect.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
The next part of the stack is your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This is the foundation to any successful sales force, and a tool that will manage your customer data from a single point of entry. Instead of a patchwork of spreadsheets, apps and databases, these are platforms that provide a centralized place where your sales team and other departments can access the same data at a moment’s notice. Automated workflows keep your commercial force on track with clear priorities and optimal timing for follow-ups, all leading to a sleek pipeline with higher conversion rates
At the core of any good CRM are more or less the same capabilities when it comes to features and functionality. The differentiation is often in areas like dashboards, reporting, sales forecasting and then the ease of customisation within the tool to fit your own sales workflow, the in-built pre-existing integrations CRMs have done with other platforms (lead-gen/prospecting, marketing activation, ERPs, management platforms etc) and the broader sales & marketing technology ecosystem.
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Salesforce is commonly seen as the best on the market but comes at a price. Allows for customisation but is often accused of being better geared towards mid-tier and enterprise customers, and less good with small businesses. If you want a CRM that can be endlessly scaled, this is difficult to ignore. Particularly strong in the area of UIs, dashboards, sales reporting, KPI management and sales forecasting.
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SugarCRM is a great challenger CRM brand that has raised serious investment. Capabilities have come on significantly in recent years. Low barrier to adopt, as the UI and functionality is simple but sophisticated.
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A well rounded CRM tool that is part of a broader Hubspot tech stack including marketing activation, leadgen management and more. Can be expensive but is powerful and often combined (pre-integration exists) with Salesforce.
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Pipedrive is affordable and good enough for early stage businesses. It has also integrated with various other softwares to a broader tech stack for sales and order management.
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Zoho specifically targets SMEs as their sweetspot (but also sells into Enterprise with an Enterprise grade offering).
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Nutshell, a CRM built for SMBs focusing on simple features and usability, at an affordable price point.
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AI-driven solid CRM all-rounder with great customisation options.
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A modern and highly customisable CRM
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Revenue Operations
At the end of the funnel, and underpinning the Sales Tool stack, you have the Revenue Operations (RevOps) tools that enable efficient delivery and the customer data and insights you need to run more predictable customer operations to scale both renewals and revenue expansion . With RevOps tools in place, when used to their full potential, they will help you retain and grow customers, and leverage predictive data to deliver valuable insights to your customer base as you scale. As with all parts of your sales and marketing stack there are numerous options — ultimately you need to evaluate platforms in the context of operational needs — better data? More automation? Powerful dashboards? More predictability?
Although this is a lot about personal preference the following are some of the platforms I would recommend.
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Clari is a modern platform that positions itself around optimising revenue management and addressing any revenue leakage within your company. Its key modules cover forecasting, pipeline management, and revenue intelligence (deal data through the entire revenue process) and can be used across all functions within your business, from sales to customer success to finance and ops.
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InsightSquared is a revenue intelligence platform providing a modular platform enabling you to run your revenue forecasting, sales pipeline management, customer success functions, use powerful revenue analytics and dashboards, monitor/record sales calls and much more. It also does a good job of providing resources and content for sales and customer success teams around best practices and tips & tricks.
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Similar to its peers, Kluster pitches itself as a suite of tools for RevOps and Revenue Leadership professionals. IT integrates with the leading CRMs and helps provide more accurate and reliable forecasting, activity tracking & insights, and a full capability to do deep-analysis on all aspects of your sales pipeline and revenue funnel.
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Customer Success Platforms
Customer Success Platforms have created a new category of tools within the traditional sales & marketing stack. There is a lot of overlap here with RevOps platforms, but equally differentiation and additional value to unlock. Customer success platforms are built to do one thing — drive NRR — through adoption of automation to enhance the capabilities of commercial excellence teams.
Just as with all of the above choosing Customer Success Platforms carefully is key to ensure they meet your evolving needs. The following three platforms are (in my humble opinion) leading the way.
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Planhat is a Stockholm founded company positioning itself as a “horizontally built customer platform where organisations manage and grow their customers, whether for customer success, product-led growth, channel management or anything else. Simply put they are a solution for any company in the NRR economy. The platform has two main solutions: Customer Success (with the single goal of powering NRR) and Product-Led Growth (with a focus on creating the best UX possible for customer journeys).
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Similar to its peers, Kluster pitches itself as a suite of tools for RevOps and Revenue Leadership professionals. IT integrates with the leading CRMs and helps provide more accurate and reliable forecasting, activity tracking & insights, and a full capability to do deep-analysis on all aspects of your sales pipeline and revenue funnel.
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ChurnZero is a Customer Success platform built around protecting client churn, driving customer stickiness, and optimising revenue management and upsell opportunities. IT has very powerful analytics and dashboard capabilities and is used successfully (and commonly) across leading SaaS-companies in Europe and the US.
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Summary
As I’ve noted, choosing and building up your Sales tool stack is a very subjective process. It is one that needs to be done through the lens of your business objectives and operating model. Some tools in the stack, e.g. a CRM, are a necessity, even at start-up phase. Others are more of a “nice to have” or can be parked and revisited as you move through funding rounds and start to establish product-market-fit and transition to scale-up phase, e.g. RevOps platforms. Whatever decisions you take in your company, remember that at the end of the day, any Sales tool you use is only as good as the adoption you achieve from your teams and the quality of data and information going into it. When used optimally, Sales tools can significantly enhance your unit economics, optimise your sales cycle, and ultimately underpin building a scalable, sustainable and industrialised sales process.
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Access the google slide templates here:
The J12 Commercial Excellence Playbook — All Template Slides (2023).