Keeping your sales performance and KPIs consistently high in today’s competitive and volatile market can be a massive challenge — and your salespeople would probably attest to as much without hesitation. 

Regardless of the tactics used in your long-term sales strategy, maintaining efficiency is nearly impossible without dedicated sales software and automation tools that make up the sales technology stack.

In this article, we dive into a vast pool of sales automation solutions covering every stage of the modern sales pipeline and identify a minimal viable structure of an efficient sales tech stack. 

In addition, we also share our team’s insights on the tools they use on a daily basis to win new business and make PandaDoc an even more popular document management platform than it is today. 

Without further ado, let’s jump right in!

What is sales technology in general?

Sales technology is a broad term referring to a variety of software tools that help automate and streamline the sales process.

From prospecting and lead generation to customer relationship management, proposal creation, and contract signing, these solutions help keep salespeople busy and productive while boosting client satisfaction and the company’s revenue. 

Why is sales technology so important?

Although the answer to this question may seem to be self-evident in the technology-driven world, we feel that we still need to elaborate on this topic.

Reason #1

Today’s consumers are knowledgeable and well-informed, so they are looking for exceptional customer experience (CX) and want to be surprised with the level of offer personalization and quality of interactions with vendors. Sales tech is all about that, especially with the advent of widely available AI that opened a new dimension in the personalization space. 

Reason #2

Advanced sales technologies help companies thrive and grow without making employees miserable from working under extreme pressure.

By automating tedious manual tasks and complex repetitive scenarios, sales technology helps them do more in less time and achieve better outcomes. 

This way, sales technology delivers solid value on both ends and — in theory — makes everyone a happier, healthier, more professionally successful person with more time to spend on things they like doing outside of work. 

And for all of you fans of statistics, here are a few to keep in mind:

Putting sales tools to good use at PandaDoc

At PandaDoc, we’re true technologists.

Our crew can’t imagine our daily work without a multitude of integrated and standalone solutions fulfilling a variety of functions.

From prospecting tools and lead scoring browser extensions to CRM systems and sales forecasting software, we’re all in. 

In other words, we try to use each and every sales enablement tool that does the job well.

Some of them are discovered through market research or suggested by our team members, and some tool combinations are just openly borrowed from other companies that share their experience with the public. 

Here is a bird’s-eye view of our sales tech stack here at PandaDoc:

Marketing_tech_stack_at_PandaDoc

We do follow the mantra that was once voiced by Mike Paladino, our former Head of Sales, and later got instilled in our business DNA:

“Steal, steal, steal, anything that works. I love divulging our secret sauce — if you think it can work for you, go for it.”

Having quoted Mike, we totally encourage you to borrow our ideas for products and product combinations for your own sales and marketing teams and adapt their usage scenarios to better address your business pain points. 

What is the sales technology stack?

The sales stack is a combination of software solutions and tools used by an organization to automate and optimize activities performed throughout the sales cycle. 

It may consist of just a few staple products or contain dozens of software tools, acting on their own or as part of an integrated infrastructure serving the needs of multiple teams and sales professionals. 

How to define your tech stack?

Building the right sales tech stack for your company is no small feat and doesn’t happen overnight. 

As your organization grows and devises new strategies for winning new and retaining existing business, your sales reps and marketing managers develop new ways of getting things done using specialized services and tools by trying them in action and leveraging their functionality to solve immediate business needs. 

Keep in mind that defining a tech stack is not the same as doing some serious software shopping and buying a bunch of licenses for all the trendy tools out there.

You purchasing decisions must be based on some solid premises:

  • Your target audience and key client profiles for outbound marketing campaigns
  • Sources of inbound leads
  • The optimal methods of presenting your marketing/sales materials or product demos to prospective clients
  • Your email campaign structure and expected cadence
  • Your key sales KPIs and their dynamics over time
  • You own conclusions on the efficiency of various sales channels (based on conversion rates and other relevant metrics)

Now that we have a general understanding of what to take into consideration, let’s take a look at some concrete steps toward defining a sales tech stack that will work for you and your business.

Hear your people out

Arguably the best way of defining a perfect sales tech stack is to build it around your existing sales pipeline.

Get your sales team members and sales managers together and collect their honest feedback on process bottlenecks, inefficiencies upsetting them the most, and the things they wish they were able to do with greater ease. 

Once these actionable insights have been captured, you’ve got the foundation of your future tech stack that you can start building upon. 

You may be surprised, but even your CRM that you have always considered to be the pillar of your sales operations could put a huge drag on the rest of your team due to being cumbersome, not very user-friendly, and operating in isolation from the rest of your tools.

We are big believers in the power of a good CRM not just as a solution for storing contact information, but as a central sales enablement hub that ties all sales- and marketing-related workflows together. 

Our CRM of choice is Salesforce, and we really appreciate it for its remarkable scalability, outstanding support, and its thriving ecosystem of apps and integrations with other business tools and platforms. 

However, Salesforce is not the only candidate for the title of an outstanding CRM.

Many of our clients use HubSpot, Pipedrive, and other products and are totally happy with them.

Assess your performance at every stage and act

Embark on an imaginary journey of a lead through your sales funnel to determine whether you are doing everything possible at each stage to achieve maximum performance and efficiency. 

For example, you may be getting a disappointingly low number of SQL (sales qualified leads) conversions from a generally healthy stream of leads.

This is a fairly clear indication that somewhere early in the process, your leads tend to disengage and lose interest in your product or service. 

In this case, you really want to focus on establishing and maintaining a constant dialog with every inbound lead as early and possible to keep them informed through trusted sources, get their questions answered, and guide them to being sales-ready. 

Here at PandaDoc, we use Drift to deal with this type of situation.

Drift is an AI-powered buyer engagement platform that helps us seamlessly engage with all incoming leads, provide them with the information they need, and ultimately set up a one-on-one meeting with one of our sales professionals.

On top of that, we use G2 as a source of social proof for our marketing pitches and BrightTALK as a media platform that helps us share our webinars with massive audiences interested in sales technologies and efficient document management.

Automate, automate, automate

Advanced document automation is the driving force behind every successful modern business. 

The good news is that automation can be implemented literally everywhere and for virtually any process.

The majority of modern SaaS tools are created with maximum automation in mind and provide ample opportunities for creating and fine-tuning automation scenarios. 

In most cases, all you need to do is to spend some time configuring templates, rules, triggers, and target workflows. 

Once the software is fully configured and ready for onboarding, you’ll notice a dramatic boost in the speed and quality of process execution, which will allow you to focus your time and energy on the things that matter the most — serving your clients better and growing your business. 

Therefore, if you see an opportunity to automate, don’t pass it by!

Your sales arsenal

The variety of sales engagement and other sales-related tools can seem overwhelming, but don’t let that stop you from experimenting and trying out new products. 

Literally every aspect of your sales process can be improved through automation or integration, so let’s consider a few areas that can benefit greatly from a modern sales tech stack.

Customer relationships management

Everything starts and ends in the CRM, the single source of truth and storage of up-to-date customer data, such as contact details, company information, history of orders, a detailed log of communications, meeting notes, and recordings of sales calls. 

Apart from being the primary contact management tool for any company, a properly configured CRM provides instant, real-time access to a complete history of customer interactions and lets your sales reps take every lead through a series of predefined steps/statuses while triggering automatic actions along the way — all to help them minimize manual data entry and close deals faster. 

Communications

Communications, both internal and external, are vital for the sales process.

When it comes to establishing early-stage contact with site visitors, AI-powered chatbots and omnichannel messengers are among the most popular options. 

We’ve already mentioned Drift, but you may also want to consider other great products like Intercom, LiveAgent, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and, of course, the massively popular Zoom, to mention just a few examples (there are many more in the market). 

On the phone calls side, tools like Gong help record calls made in a variety of other solutions, analyze them using advanced AI, single out winning call scenarios and identify deal-breakers — all leading to more predictable, data-driven business outcomes in the future and facilitating the onboarding process for new employees.

Internal communications are typically covered by messengers and communication and collaboration platforms like Slack, which is a de facto standard in a number of industries. 

Finally, efficient communications would not be possible without scheduling tools like Calendly, which enables your prospects to easily schedule meetings with your sales reps right on your website.

We’re also big fans of Chili Piper, which enables reps from different offices to schedule client demos and pass those meetings across the entire team with great ease.

Lead prospecting and nurturing

Depending on where your leads predominantly come from (inbound organic/paid traffic or through outbound email marketing campaigns or other types of active lead generation), your approach to personalized messaging and lead nurturing in general will vary significantly. 

At PandaDoc, for example, our sales activities are mostly inbound-driven, as our prospective clients land on one of our website pages and then request a demo or sign up for a free 14-day trial.

Once we have a new lead, it undergoes a series of operations:

If your lead generation model leans towards outbound activities and lead generation using email outreach campaigns and direct messaging, you might want to consider using a different subset of tools. 

For instance, you may want to check out LeadFuze, Zoominfo, Hunter.io, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Overloop, and similar apps for a convenient way of mining valuable client data in preparation for targeted and highly personalized marketing campaigns.

It goes without saying that they are absolutely indispensable for companies relying on ABM (account-based marketing) principles in their marketing operations.

Engaging with qualified leads

Once a lead has been captured and passed on to the sales team, there comes a time for meaningful human interactions that, ideally, will result in a closed deal. 

PandaDoc uses SalesLoft for this purpose.

The software seamlessly integrates with Salesforce CRM and provides everything we need to add qualified leads to corresponding cadences that ensure maximum engagement with said leads through carefully designed sequences of emails, calls, videos, and other marketing touches. 

These SalesLoft cadences help sales reps save a great deal of time and remain confident that all registered leads receive their fair share of attention on their way to converting into paying customers.

SalesLoft comes loaded with state-of-the-art automation features with flexible rules that enable us to segment leads based on company size, industry, function, persona, and any other relevant parameters. 

Additional tools like Owler and Crystal help us stay abreast of the most recent developments on the lead’s side and target them with laser-like precision.

Other solutions similar to SalesLoft include Revenue.io, Upscale, Vymo, and others.

Sales forecasting

Scaling your business and ensuring its sustainability is impossible without forecasting.

Financial forecasting features and configurable executive dashboards are typically part of any decent CRM system, so the easiest way to provide detailed insights to sales leaders and senior management would be to use those out-of-the-box features.

At the same time, precise forecasting requires that the underlying data be as complete and accurate as possible at all times.

Therefore, it is imperative that sales reps regularly update corresponding fields in their opportunities/deals. 

If, however, you are looking for a more advanced solution for planning and forecasting, it’s a good idea to check out DataHug — a professional tool that we’ve been using for a long time in combination with Salesforce. 

Here’s how DataHug helps our sales reps in their day-to-day work:

  • Faster and more efficient forecasting meetings with the management 
  • One place to update statuses and scores without having to go to Salesforce
  • A convenient tool for determining the best sales reps and those who are struggling to meet their quotas
  • Ease of trend analysis after pricing adjustment and other changes in the sales department

Creating and managing proposals

One of the staples of any sales process, a powerful proposal generation and management tool is of paramount importance for any organization. 

It’s not just a way of efficiently delivering the vision of a deal, but also a mechanism that enables the company to keep all of their documents, templates, and contracts under control and conveniently collaborate on them while ensuring design consistency, compliance, and ultimate accuracy across the board. 

It is apparent that we use our own product for this purpose.

PandaDoc is not just a state-of-the-art proposal creation platform with rich collaboration features, but also a powerful quote generation product with CPQ functionality, an eSigning tool, and a robust, secure document management system that seamlessly integrates with the majority of mainstream sales and marketing apps. 

Other options to consider for proposal management purposes include Proposify, Qwirl, DealHub.io, and GetAccept.

Signing documents electronically

Putting a signature on a contract is the ultimate goal of every sales rep.

Fortunately, today’s technologies support electronic signatures so that you don’t have to chase your clients for their John Hancock on the document you agreed upon. 

As mentioned above, PandaDoc comes with a very powerful, legally binding, ESIGN and UETA compliant electronic signature functionality, which is naturally the reason why we use it for all our documents and suggest that you try it out, too.

However, there are other solutions in this category that do the job very well: DocuSign, SignNow, eSignatures.io, DropBox Sign, SignEasy and many others.

Check them out to see how well their offerings align with your needs as an organization.

Getting paid

The final accord in every business deal and the quote-to-cash process (Q2C) is the dual responsibility of invoicing and payment collection. 

Since we are a business dealing primarily with recurring subscription payments, we use Recurly for invoicing our clients and getting paid.

It offers everything necessary for managing our vast subscriber base, generating detailed financial reports, financial forecasting, and also integrates exceptionally well with the rest of our sales tech stack. 

Other notable players in this field include FreshBooks, ChargeOver, Zuora, Pabbly, Stripe, Maxio, Helcim, Xero, Chargebee and many others.

Their features and pricing vary significantly, so it’s best to explore their marketing materials and reviews on sites like G2 and Gartner Peer Insights to make the right choice.

Keeping churn at bay

Last but not least on the list of essential sales tools are software solutions that help you measure and prevent churn — the outflow of paying clients that can be detected early if the right metrics are being monitored. 

PandaDoc, for one, uses ChurnZero, a specialized customer success platform that helps you track your customers’ “health” and take corresponding measures if things go south. 

Our standard practice is to add our new accounts to ChurnZero right after onboarding and closely monitor their satisfaction with our product and services on a regular basis. 

The platform integrates well with our CRM and client support systems, providing us with a holistic view of product adoption speed and customer satisfaction levels.

Picking the right sales enablement tools for your team

The process of designing and implementing a perfect sales technology stack is a collective effort by sales leaders and regular employees alike.

Here are some tips on things to include in your pre-flight checklist.

Research the market and identify the tools you need

Take your time to thoroughly research the market to identify tools and platforms that align with your sales needs and most acute process pains.

Check out user reviews on social networks and trusted review sites.

Contact the companies of interest and request demos or sign up for free trials to see every software in action.

Evaluate integration compatibility

Few products can work well in isolation.

For example, here is how the software setup looks for the individual contributor in PandaDoc:

This is just a small portion of our diverse software ecosystem, with many more services and platforms playing their important roles in the growth of the company. 

If you are out shopping for the best sales enablement tools for your business, make 100% sure that they will be able to “talk” to each other and integrate with your existing tools such as your CRM, marketing automation, and communication tools.

Focus on user experience and adoption

Many software tools present little to no value in and of themselves.

Tools are created to be used by people, and their acceptance of the tools is something that you should focus on in the first turn. 

Choose tools that are intuitive and user-friendly so that people will not shy away from them.

Offer initial training and onboarding support to your employees to see adoption go up and yield tangible results.

Give preference to solutions that can be accessed and efficiently used on-the-go on mobile devices.

Conclusion

With hundreds upon hundreds of outstanding sales tools available on the market, building the perfect tech stack for your sales team is a challenging endeavor that will take a while.

However, you don’t need to do everything at once and there is always the option of taking a free trial to evaluate a particular tool.

Keep in mind that your sales success is more about people than it is about tools, which makes internal alignment and adoption your utmost priorities. 

Making sure that everyone is comfortable with the proposed stack and understands its mechanics is the fastest lane to greater operational efficiency and higher revenue — not to mention the satisfaction of your employees and their ability to shift focus from mundane data entry to the creative and value-adding part of their jobs. 

And yet again, when it comes down to making the right choices, we cannot help chanting our favorite mantra: “Steal, steal, steal everything that works!”

Disclaimer

PandaDoc is not a law firm, or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. This page is not intended to and does not provide legal advice. Should you have legal questions on the validity of e-signatures or digital signatures and the enforceability thereof, please consult with an attorney or law firm. Use of PandaDoc services are governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Originally published June 14, 2019, updated August 29, 2024