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How do you build a killer sales tech stack in 2024?
It took me years to test the most buzzing tools out there… To finally come up with a list of 21 that are indeed the best.
When looking back at the old times of sales, our tools were pretty basic. We had the CRM for sales tracking, Excel for reports, and Outlook for emails. Now, with the amount of tech being developed, it’s more and more tempting to say, 'Screw it, I am staying old-school,' and never worry about all the innovation going around.
But is it the best way for your sales team? I doubt. 73% of salespeople use some sort of tech to sell products nowadays. And you need to stay on top of everybody else. So you either use it or lose it.
Regrettably for my nervous system, I decided to pursue another way of thinking: 'Let’s try as many tools as possible to get the edge,' as the old school approach wasn’t proving itself whatsoever.
So, I ended up trying 130 sales tech tools. And while, yes, it worked, and the new sales tech stack allowed us to close deals at a rate 300% higher every month, it took so many sleepless nights trying out heaps of tools and eventually trashing 90% of them.
And probably the most exciting part is if you’re in the middle of building or upgrading your sales technology stack and feel lost, this article will have all the answers about different types of tools I was looking for myself when going through this.
This list is 100% unbiased, and we haven’t received any payment from these companies.
What is a sales tech stack?
A sales tech stack is the combination of sales and automation software that your sales team uses daily. When done right, it makes the sales process more efficient and drives your revenue up. But if you mess it up, it can do the opposite, damaging your team’s performance and becoming a sales killer.
Any well-developed sales tech stack needs to cover both tech and automation. In other words, the tools you choose should play well together, creating a harmonious work environment.
The average sales organization used to use 10 tools 5 years ago according to the most recent report I found. And although there are more and more advocates for a 'one-tool-fits-all' approach, I found that the best results can be achieved when using specialized tools for specific tasks. And that's where the magic of automation tools comes in.
After Testing 130 Tools, These are the 21 Every Sales Stack Should Have
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Needless to say, if you’re serious about sales, you need the right CRM. If you don’t want to waste hundreds of your hours on spreadsheets, this is the #1 software you should get first to keep track of your customer data. It’s your go-to for tracking your sales pipeline and customer interactions.
I won’t go deep into each of these sales tools. There are other articles where I discuss crm tools in-depth. Here, I’ll highlight the best options for various needs (I have zero affiliation with the links provided):
Pipedrive - ideal for agencies or consulting businesses, especially if you're into outbound outreach and have more than 10 folks and at least 1 SDR on board. You don’t need a CRM if you have a smaller team. Pipedrive is perfect for low-volume pipelines and short sales cycles without the unnecessary bells and whistles.
Close - great for startups. That was our pick as we didn’t have a big budget or thousands of deals. But at the same time, I found it way more powerful than Pipedrive, packing just the right amount of automation features and integrations. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to giants like HubSpot or Salesforce, yet it has enough functionality and flexibility.
HubSpot - another popular choice among startups. While I truly love HubSpot and consider it one of the best CRMs out there, I wouldn't recommend it for teams with fewer than 50 sales professionals.
Although you don't necessarily need an outsourced team to set it up for you (compared to Salesforce), it won't come out nicely out of the box and will require some upfront time investment and learning.
In terms of cost, it can get expensive quickly, and the more you use it for different things, the messier it becomes. That's why, if your company is mature enough to adopt a $5k-$10k yearly CRM, I'd definitely consider HubSpot.
One tip is not to try to use HubSpot for anything but Sales. I've spent hours trying to make some value out of Marketing and Service Hubs, configuring workflows and also playing around with the CMS they offer - it's not worth it. While some may argue and say it's nice to have everything in one place, it definitely is, but don't expect any terrific results from this.
Salesforce - alright, it's time to address the elephant in the room. Briefly put, don't even look in this direction unless you have a budget of $20k+ in mind and the willingness to spend weeks and hours with consultants and tech teams to build something really cool. Yet, what's considered 'cool' is subjective.
After spending over 100 hours in Salesforce, I can officially say that it's been the worst user experience ever. The design is outdated and completely not user-friendly. While this CRM is extremely flexible and allows you to build things like lego, it's up to you to figure out these lego parts. This is extremely inconvenient, time-consuming, and expensive.
So, while it's a solid choice for companies with lots of data, big sales teams, and a generous budget, I'd personally recommend to postpone this transition as long as I could and stick to HubSpot. However, there's nothing more powerful than Salesforce out there. Nothing.
Sales Enablement
Now that you have all this data in place, how are you actually going to make the most out of it? Honestly, most of the time, a simple spreadsheet report is enough. Sales enablement software allows you to step up. The problem is that there are millions of tools claiming that they can help you. Although I haven't tried them all, I've had a chance to play around with around 50 of the most popular ones. Here are the ones worth your time:
Gong - A super cool tool to analyze your phone and online calls and generate insights from the conversations. It has a powerful model that can identify different trends and patterns and assist your sales reps on the go.
HighSpot - A bit pricey but 100% worth the money. It's like a big digital library where you can keep important content, pictures, and selling manuals. When someone needs to show or tell a potential customer about their product, they can quickly find the best story or picture from this library.
Honestly, I would stop here. Anything else wouldn't be a great return on your time if you have two of the above.
Sales Engagement Tools
Your CRM is not your sales engagement platform. Yes, you can do everything from HubSpot, but just don't. You need to have a place to efficiently communicate to your prospects, by calling and sending them emails (which what you're probably doing the most).You can automate your follow-up emails, email sequences and every other customer engagement activity that usually leads to more closing deals.
It's way more effective to integrate your CRM with a tool that was explicitly built for your engagement game. It allows revenue leaders to have a pretty in-depth overview of a pipeline with dollars attached to it, while sales reps can focus on the actual nitty-gritty of the engagement.
Outreach - Best if you have a sales team of 50+ people. It can be a bit complicated, but it's mega powerful. Aside from the issues with Salesforce connectivity (which I believe is on SFDC's side), it's a great sales software with a ton of features. That's why we decided not to use it.
Salesloft - Best for startups. Think of it as a more user-friendly Outreach for smaller teams. I found it easier to add new prospects, the dialer seems to load faster, and the historical activity tracking and reporting work better. It's easier overall, which means it's going to save you a lot of time.
Scheduling Tools
In 2023, in the post-COVID world, 85% of sales calls happen online. To value both our time and your customers' time, it's inevitable that you will need a tool to schedule meetings. If you Google it, you will see how many tools are out there that do the exact same thing, so I will just make it simple for you:
Zcal - If you need to stay cheap, it's free and it works well.
If you want a reliable choice with lots of integrations, get Calendly.
That's it. Very simple.
Sales Analytics & Reporting
This is the most overlooked topic by many sales teams. And it's not because they don't understand the value of it but rather the complexity of setup. You usually can't do this by yourself if you're non-technical, so it might be tempting to skip this step. Do not. Many sales teams fail because they don't have the right analytics in place.
Usually, different analytics tools serve different purposes, and it also varies from industry to industry. So if your only current reporting and analytics solution is Excel, here's a breakdown of tools you might consider to stay accountable and track the sales activities happening in your sales funnel:
Mixpanel - the #1 digital product analytics. If you have a web app or a website with heavy traffic, Mixpanel would be the best choice. The main alternatives are Fullstory, but it gets very expensive, and Amplitude, which is more complicated than Mixpanel but offers some more flexibility that I never found useful.
Google Analytics - a go-to for your website user analytics if you want to know some free basic information about your conversion rates and also not bad to set up advertisement retargeting campaigns.
Other than that, it became really crappy with the last update (now it's Google Analytics 4, and it was Universal Analytics before that), where Google is trying to upsell Bigquery to their analytics users, which is just an extra layer of complexity.
So, if you need more than basic information from your website, just adding Mixpanel will take this hassle off your shoulders.
PowerBI or Tableau - if you have a LOT of data to analyze stored in your database, then having a BI tool could be a game-changer, while also saving you from over-utilizing spreadsheets. You will need to ask your engineers to set this up or hire a consultant and then invest in training for your team and yourself.
PopSQL - a SQL client if you are familiar with SQL and know how to run queries. It's a simple but effective tool to pull up information directly from your database.
Datalynx - if you want a plug-and-play solution. After you integrate it with your CRM and database, you will be able to ask questions using plain English.
Think of it as a company AI data analyst that knows your data. It's especially helpful for sales leaders and sales managers to identify actionable insights and monitor their team's perfomance.
Sales Automation
As I mentioned earlier, when you go down the route of specialized tools rather than generalists, it's important to automate and integrate your environment. Otherwise, the sales process will become too complicated to manage and make your team unhappy and stressed.
It's a good idea to have somebody in sales ops managing all the automation for you. For example, if you do some sales engagement outside of your CRM, it should all be tracked by your CRM automatically and then flow right into your reporting software.
While 90% of the tools I mentioned integrate between each other pretty seamlessly, often it's not enough. Here are the only two other tools you should have to automate hundreds of repetitive tasks in your sales team:
Zapier if you want a stress-free, foolproof tool that will allow you to integrate all the sales stack together. I've tried tens of alternatives, and it's simply the best for now. Simple to navigate, minimum up-front learning, and solves 90% of automation tasks.
N8N if you need to stay cheap and are more technical. It's also more advanced but at the cost of higher complexity. So if the budget is your concern and you don't mind figuring out how automation works at a deeper level, N8N is a great choice. That's what we ended up using, but only because we have a pretty technical sales team.
Leads Sourcing
Inbound is king, we all know that. But outbound still works. And even for inbound, you usually want to know as much contact information as possible about every potential customer, who signed up for a demo (please don't make it a struggle and ask 50 questions to qualify somebody).
When it comes to lead generation, as you can already assume with any other sales tech out there, everyone has a #1 sales intelligence tool to find new leads. Here's what I found works the best:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Evaboot if you trust LinkedIn to get leads and have a shoestring budget. It's the cheapest way to get many decent quality leads. Yet, I found the LinkedIn Sales Nav becomes less and less reliable with a crazy amount of fake profiles and honestly pretty wonky filtering that often gives you incorrect results.
Apollo is another good software if you have some more budget in place. It has good leads and can also help you with lead scoring and inbound leads enrichment (and even prospecting). In other words, the only thing it lacks is the quality of the leads compared to some more expensive software. Aside from that, it's a decent choice.
Zoominfo if you need the best leads and can afford it - definitely go for it. I haven't seen any tool yet (aside from custom scripts that your engineers can write specifically for your request) that will have more qualified leads than Zoominfo does.
So yes, when it usually costs you 2 times more than Apollo, it's definitely worth it, especially if you prioritize quality over quantity.
Lessons Learned
Navigating through the vast sea of sales tech was no small feat. Early on, it became evident that not every shiny tool was a golden ticket. We were, in many ways, kids in a candy store. We got excited by every new tool and feature, but not all were meant for us.
Here's what we learned from this part of our journey:
Avoid Tool Overload: Just because there's a new tool out there doesn't mean it's right for your business. I had my moments, diving deep into the functionalities of tools, only to realize that they weren’t a good fit. It's essential to understand the real needs of your business first.
Integration is King: A tool might be stellar on its own but if it doesn’t gel well with your existing stack, it might be more of a dragging force. We learned this the hard way. A seamlessly integrated tech environment is not just efficient but it also keeps the morale of the team high.
Investment vs. ROI: Just because a tool is expensive doesn’t mean it's the best. Salesforce might be the giant in the CRM space, but for us, the user experience didn't match up to its reputation. It’s all about finding what gives you the best bang for your buck.
Know Your Needs: Startups, especially, need to be careful with their choices. With limited resources and often high burn-rate, the key is to pick tools that align perfectly with the business size and needs. For instance, Hubspot might be a great for many, but at the same time it might be overkill for your team.
Trust but Verify: Recommendations are great, but nothing beats firsthand experience. I often found myself following the popular opinion, only to realize that the popular doesn’t mean applicable. It’s essential to take every piece of advice with a pinch of salt and give it a shot yourself.
Conclusion
To wrap up, the journey from being overwhelmed by the gazillion of tech tools to finally setting up an efficient sales tech stack was both challenging and exciting. In the fast-paced world of sales, where every second counts, the right tools can be a game-changer. Our sales figures, post the sales overhaul proves this very well.
For companies getting on the same journey, here's my two cents: It's not about having the most tools but the right ones. It's not about being state-of-the-art but about being efficient and effective.
As we learned, sometimes the difference between success and failure isn't just hard work, but working smart. And in today's world, working smart often means investing in the right sales tech stack.
So, dive in, experiment, learn, and equip your business with the best tools out there. Your future self will thank you!
How do you build a killer sales tech stack in 2024?
It took me years to test the most buzzing tools out there… To finally come up with a list of 21 that are indeed the best.
When looking back at the old times of sales, our tools were pretty basic. We had the CRM for sales tracking, Excel for reports, and Outlook for emails. Now, with the amount of tech being developed, it’s more and more tempting to say, 'Screw it, I am staying old-school,' and never worry about all the innovation going around.
But is it the best way for your sales team? I doubt. 73% of salespeople use some sort of tech to sell products nowadays. And you need to stay on top of everybody else. So you either use it or lose it.
Regrettably for my nervous system, I decided to pursue another way of thinking: 'Let’s try as many tools as possible to get the edge,' as the old school approach wasn’t proving itself whatsoever.
So, I ended up trying 130 sales tech tools. And while, yes, it worked, and the new sales tech stack allowed us to close deals at a rate 300% higher every month, it took so many sleepless nights trying out heaps of tools and eventually trashing 90% of them.
And probably the most exciting part is if you’re in the middle of building or upgrading your sales technology stack and feel lost, this article will have all the answers about different types of tools I was looking for myself when going through this.
This list is 100% unbiased, and we haven’t received any payment from these companies.
What is a sales tech stack?
A sales tech stack is the combination of sales and automation software that your sales team uses daily. When done right, it makes the sales process more efficient and drives your revenue up. But if you mess it up, it can do the opposite, damaging your team’s performance and becoming a sales killer.
Any well-developed sales tech stack needs to cover both tech and automation. In other words, the tools you choose should play well together, creating a harmonious work environment.
The average sales organization used to use 10 tools 5 years ago according to the most recent report I found. And although there are more and more advocates for a 'one-tool-fits-all' approach, I found that the best results can be achieved when using specialized tools for specific tasks. And that's where the magic of automation tools comes in.
After Testing 130 Tools, These are the 21 Every Sales Stack Should Have
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Needless to say, if you’re serious about sales, you need the right CRM. If you don’t want to waste hundreds of your hours on spreadsheets, this is the #1 software you should get first to keep track of your customer data. It’s your go-to for tracking your sales pipeline and customer interactions.
I won’t go deep into each of these sales tools. There are other articles where I discuss crm tools in-depth. Here, I’ll highlight the best options for various needs (I have zero affiliation with the links provided):
Pipedrive - ideal for agencies or consulting businesses, especially if you're into outbound outreach and have more than 10 folks and at least 1 SDR on board. You don’t need a CRM if you have a smaller team. Pipedrive is perfect for low-volume pipelines and short sales cycles without the unnecessary bells and whistles.
Close - great for startups. That was our pick as we didn’t have a big budget or thousands of deals. But at the same time, I found it way more powerful than Pipedrive, packing just the right amount of automation features and integrations. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to giants like HubSpot or Salesforce, yet it has enough functionality and flexibility.
HubSpot - another popular choice among startups. While I truly love HubSpot and consider it one of the best CRMs out there, I wouldn't recommend it for teams with fewer than 50 sales professionals.
Although you don't necessarily need an outsourced team to set it up for you (compared to Salesforce), it won't come out nicely out of the box and will require some upfront time investment and learning.
In terms of cost, it can get expensive quickly, and the more you use it for different things, the messier it becomes. That's why, if your company is mature enough to adopt a $5k-$10k yearly CRM, I'd definitely consider HubSpot.
One tip is not to try to use HubSpot for anything but Sales. I've spent hours trying to make some value out of Marketing and Service Hubs, configuring workflows and also playing around with the CMS they offer - it's not worth it. While some may argue and say it's nice to have everything in one place, it definitely is, but don't expect any terrific results from this.
Salesforce - alright, it's time to address the elephant in the room. Briefly put, don't even look in this direction unless you have a budget of $20k+ in mind and the willingness to spend weeks and hours with consultants and tech teams to build something really cool. Yet, what's considered 'cool' is subjective.
After spending over 100 hours in Salesforce, I can officially say that it's been the worst user experience ever. The design is outdated and completely not user-friendly. While this CRM is extremely flexible and allows you to build things like lego, it's up to you to figure out these lego parts. This is extremely inconvenient, time-consuming, and expensive.
So, while it's a solid choice for companies with lots of data, big sales teams, and a generous budget, I'd personally recommend to postpone this transition as long as I could and stick to HubSpot. However, there's nothing more powerful than Salesforce out there. Nothing.
Sales Enablement
Now that you have all this data in place, how are you actually going to make the most out of it? Honestly, most of the time, a simple spreadsheet report is enough. Sales enablement software allows you to step up. The problem is that there are millions of tools claiming that they can help you. Although I haven't tried them all, I've had a chance to play around with around 50 of the most popular ones. Here are the ones worth your time:
Gong - A super cool tool to analyze your phone and online calls and generate insights from the conversations. It has a powerful model that can identify different trends and patterns and assist your sales reps on the go.
HighSpot - A bit pricey but 100% worth the money. It's like a big digital library where you can keep important content, pictures, and selling manuals. When someone needs to show or tell a potential customer about their product, they can quickly find the best story or picture from this library.
Honestly, I would stop here. Anything else wouldn't be a great return on your time if you have two of the above.
Sales Engagement Tools
Your CRM is not your sales engagement platform. Yes, you can do everything from HubSpot, but just don't. You need to have a place to efficiently communicate to your prospects, by calling and sending them emails (which what you're probably doing the most).You can automate your follow-up emails, email sequences and every other customer engagement activity that usually leads to more closing deals.
It's way more effective to integrate your CRM with a tool that was explicitly built for your engagement game. It allows revenue leaders to have a pretty in-depth overview of a pipeline with dollars attached to it, while sales reps can focus on the actual nitty-gritty of the engagement.
Outreach - Best if you have a sales team of 50+ people. It can be a bit complicated, but it's mega powerful. Aside from the issues with Salesforce connectivity (which I believe is on SFDC's side), it's a great sales software with a ton of features. That's why we decided not to use it.
Salesloft - Best for startups. Think of it as a more user-friendly Outreach for smaller teams. I found it easier to add new prospects, the dialer seems to load faster, and the historical activity tracking and reporting work better. It's easier overall, which means it's going to save you a lot of time.
Scheduling Tools
In 2023, in the post-COVID world, 85% of sales calls happen online. To value both our time and your customers' time, it's inevitable that you will need a tool to schedule meetings. If you Google it, you will see how many tools are out there that do the exact same thing, so I will just make it simple for you:
Zcal - If you need to stay cheap, it's free and it works well.
If you want a reliable choice with lots of integrations, get Calendly.
That's it. Very simple.
Sales Analytics & Reporting
This is the most overlooked topic by many sales teams. And it's not because they don't understand the value of it but rather the complexity of setup. You usually can't do this by yourself if you're non-technical, so it might be tempting to skip this step. Do not. Many sales teams fail because they don't have the right analytics in place.
Usually, different analytics tools serve different purposes, and it also varies from industry to industry. So if your only current reporting and analytics solution is Excel, here's a breakdown of tools you might consider to stay accountable and track the sales activities happening in your sales funnel:
Mixpanel - the #1 digital product analytics. If you have a web app or a website with heavy traffic, Mixpanel would be the best choice. The main alternatives are Fullstory, but it gets very expensive, and Amplitude, which is more complicated than Mixpanel but offers some more flexibility that I never found useful.
Google Analytics - a go-to for your website user analytics if you want to know some free basic information about your conversion rates and also not bad to set up advertisement retargeting campaigns.
Other than that, it became really crappy with the last update (now it's Google Analytics 4, and it was Universal Analytics before that), where Google is trying to upsell Bigquery to their analytics users, which is just an extra layer of complexity.
So, if you need more than basic information from your website, just adding Mixpanel will take this hassle off your shoulders.
PowerBI or Tableau - if you have a LOT of data to analyze stored in your database, then having a BI tool could be a game-changer, while also saving you from over-utilizing spreadsheets. You will need to ask your engineers to set this up or hire a consultant and then invest in training for your team and yourself.
PopSQL - a SQL client if you are familiar with SQL and know how to run queries. It's a simple but effective tool to pull up information directly from your database.
Datalynx - if you want a plug-and-play solution. After you integrate it with your CRM and database, you will be able to ask questions using plain English.
Think of it as a company AI data analyst that knows your data. It's especially helpful for sales leaders and sales managers to identify actionable insights and monitor their team's perfomance.
Sales Automation
As I mentioned earlier, when you go down the route of specialized tools rather than generalists, it's important to automate and integrate your environment. Otherwise, the sales process will become too complicated to manage and make your team unhappy and stressed.
It's a good idea to have somebody in sales ops managing all the automation for you. For example, if you do some sales engagement outside of your CRM, it should all be tracked by your CRM automatically and then flow right into your reporting software.
While 90% of the tools I mentioned integrate between each other pretty seamlessly, often it's not enough. Here are the only two other tools you should have to automate hundreds of repetitive tasks in your sales team:
Zapier if you want a stress-free, foolproof tool that will allow you to integrate all the sales stack together. I've tried tens of alternatives, and it's simply the best for now. Simple to navigate, minimum up-front learning, and solves 90% of automation tasks.
N8N if you need to stay cheap and are more technical. It's also more advanced but at the cost of higher complexity. So if the budget is your concern and you don't mind figuring out how automation works at a deeper level, N8N is a great choice. That's what we ended up using, but only because we have a pretty technical sales team.
Leads Sourcing
Inbound is king, we all know that. But outbound still works. And even for inbound, you usually want to know as much contact information as possible about every potential customer, who signed up for a demo (please don't make it a struggle and ask 50 questions to qualify somebody).
When it comes to lead generation, as you can already assume with any other sales tech out there, everyone has a #1 sales intelligence tool to find new leads. Here's what I found works the best:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Evaboot if you trust LinkedIn to get leads and have a shoestring budget. It's the cheapest way to get many decent quality leads. Yet, I found the LinkedIn Sales Nav becomes less and less reliable with a crazy amount of fake profiles and honestly pretty wonky filtering that often gives you incorrect results.
Apollo is another good software if you have some more budget in place. It has good leads and can also help you with lead scoring and inbound leads enrichment (and even prospecting). In other words, the only thing it lacks is the quality of the leads compared to some more expensive software. Aside from that, it's a decent choice.
Zoominfo if you need the best leads and can afford it - definitely go for it. I haven't seen any tool yet (aside from custom scripts that your engineers can write specifically for your request) that will have more qualified leads than Zoominfo does.
So yes, when it usually costs you 2 times more than Apollo, it's definitely worth it, especially if you prioritize quality over quantity.
Lessons Learned
Navigating through the vast sea of sales tech was no small feat. Early on, it became evident that not every shiny tool was a golden ticket. We were, in many ways, kids in a candy store. We got excited by every new tool and feature, but not all were meant for us.
Here's what we learned from this part of our journey:
Avoid Tool Overload: Just because there's a new tool out there doesn't mean it's right for your business. I had my moments, diving deep into the functionalities of tools, only to realize that they weren’t a good fit. It's essential to understand the real needs of your business first.
Integration is King: A tool might be stellar on its own but if it doesn’t gel well with your existing stack, it might be more of a dragging force. We learned this the hard way. A seamlessly integrated tech environment is not just efficient but it also keeps the morale of the team high.
Investment vs. ROI: Just because a tool is expensive doesn’t mean it's the best. Salesforce might be the giant in the CRM space, but for us, the user experience didn't match up to its reputation. It’s all about finding what gives you the best bang for your buck.
Know Your Needs: Startups, especially, need to be careful with their choices. With limited resources and often high burn-rate, the key is to pick tools that align perfectly with the business size and needs. For instance, Hubspot might be a great for many, but at the same time it might be overkill for your team.
Trust but Verify: Recommendations are great, but nothing beats firsthand experience. I often found myself following the popular opinion, only to realize that the popular doesn’t mean applicable. It’s essential to take every piece of advice with a pinch of salt and give it a shot yourself.
Conclusion
To wrap up, the journey from being overwhelmed by the gazillion of tech tools to finally setting up an efficient sales tech stack was both challenging and exciting. In the fast-paced world of sales, where every second counts, the right tools can be a game-changer. Our sales figures, post the sales overhaul proves this very well.
For companies getting on the same journey, here's my two cents: It's not about having the most tools but the right ones. It's not about being state-of-the-art but about being efficient and effective.
As we learned, sometimes the difference between success and failure isn't just hard work, but working smart. And in today's world, working smart often means investing in the right sales tech stack.
So, dive in, experiment, learn, and equip your business with the best tools out there. Your future self will thank you!
How do you build a killer sales tech stack in 2024?
It took me years to test the most buzzing tools out there… To finally come up with a list of 21 that are indeed the best.
When looking back at the old times of sales, our tools were pretty basic. We had the CRM for sales tracking, Excel for reports, and Outlook for emails. Now, with the amount of tech being developed, it’s more and more tempting to say, 'Screw it, I am staying old-school,' and never worry about all the innovation going around.
But is it the best way for your sales team? I doubt. 73% of salespeople use some sort of tech to sell products nowadays. And you need to stay on top of everybody else. So you either use it or lose it.
Regrettably for my nervous system, I decided to pursue another way of thinking: 'Let’s try as many tools as possible to get the edge,' as the old school approach wasn’t proving itself whatsoever.
So, I ended up trying 130 sales tech tools. And while, yes, it worked, and the new sales tech stack allowed us to close deals at a rate 300% higher every month, it took so many sleepless nights trying out heaps of tools and eventually trashing 90% of them.
And probably the most exciting part is if you’re in the middle of building or upgrading your sales technology stack and feel lost, this article will have all the answers about different types of tools I was looking for myself when going through this.
This list is 100% unbiased, and we haven’t received any payment from these companies.
What is a sales tech stack?
A sales tech stack is the combination of sales and automation software that your sales team uses daily. When done right, it makes the sales process more efficient and drives your revenue up. But if you mess it up, it can do the opposite, damaging your team’s performance and becoming a sales killer.
Any well-developed sales tech stack needs to cover both tech and automation. In other words, the tools you choose should play well together, creating a harmonious work environment.
The average sales organization used to use 10 tools 5 years ago according to the most recent report I found. And although there are more and more advocates for a 'one-tool-fits-all' approach, I found that the best results can be achieved when using specialized tools for specific tasks. And that's where the magic of automation tools comes in.
After Testing 130 Tools, These are the 21 Every Sales Stack Should Have
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Needless to say, if you’re serious about sales, you need the right CRM. If you don’t want to waste hundreds of your hours on spreadsheets, this is the #1 software you should get first to keep track of your customer data. It’s your go-to for tracking your sales pipeline and customer interactions.
I won’t go deep into each of these sales tools. There are other articles where I discuss crm tools in-depth. Here, I’ll highlight the best options for various needs (I have zero affiliation with the links provided):
Pipedrive - ideal for agencies or consulting businesses, especially if you're into outbound outreach and have more than 10 folks and at least 1 SDR on board. You don’t need a CRM if you have a smaller team. Pipedrive is perfect for low-volume pipelines and short sales cycles without the unnecessary bells and whistles.
Close - great for startups. That was our pick as we didn’t have a big budget or thousands of deals. But at the same time, I found it way more powerful than Pipedrive, packing just the right amount of automation features and integrations. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to giants like HubSpot or Salesforce, yet it has enough functionality and flexibility.
HubSpot - another popular choice among startups. While I truly love HubSpot and consider it one of the best CRMs out there, I wouldn't recommend it for teams with fewer than 50 sales professionals.
Although you don't necessarily need an outsourced team to set it up for you (compared to Salesforce), it won't come out nicely out of the box and will require some upfront time investment and learning.
In terms of cost, it can get expensive quickly, and the more you use it for different things, the messier it becomes. That's why, if your company is mature enough to adopt a $5k-$10k yearly CRM, I'd definitely consider HubSpot.
One tip is not to try to use HubSpot for anything but Sales. I've spent hours trying to make some value out of Marketing and Service Hubs, configuring workflows and also playing around with the CMS they offer - it's not worth it. While some may argue and say it's nice to have everything in one place, it definitely is, but don't expect any terrific results from this.
Salesforce - alright, it's time to address the elephant in the room. Briefly put, don't even look in this direction unless you have a budget of $20k+ in mind and the willingness to spend weeks and hours with consultants and tech teams to build something really cool. Yet, what's considered 'cool' is subjective.
After spending over 100 hours in Salesforce, I can officially say that it's been the worst user experience ever. The design is outdated and completely not user-friendly. While this CRM is extremely flexible and allows you to build things like lego, it's up to you to figure out these lego parts. This is extremely inconvenient, time-consuming, and expensive.
So, while it's a solid choice for companies with lots of data, big sales teams, and a generous budget, I'd personally recommend to postpone this transition as long as I could and stick to HubSpot. However, there's nothing more powerful than Salesforce out there. Nothing.
Sales Enablement
Now that you have all this data in place, how are you actually going to make the most out of it? Honestly, most of the time, a simple spreadsheet report is enough. Sales enablement software allows you to step up. The problem is that there are millions of tools claiming that they can help you. Although I haven't tried them all, I've had a chance to play around with around 50 of the most popular ones. Here are the ones worth your time:
Gong - A super cool tool to analyze your phone and online calls and generate insights from the conversations. It has a powerful model that can identify different trends and patterns and assist your sales reps on the go.
HighSpot - A bit pricey but 100% worth the money. It's like a big digital library where you can keep important content, pictures, and selling manuals. When someone needs to show or tell a potential customer about their product, they can quickly find the best story or picture from this library.
Honestly, I would stop here. Anything else wouldn't be a great return on your time if you have two of the above.
Sales Engagement Tools
Your CRM is not your sales engagement platform. Yes, you can do everything from HubSpot, but just don't. You need to have a place to efficiently communicate to your prospects, by calling and sending them emails (which what you're probably doing the most).You can automate your follow-up emails, email sequences and every other customer engagement activity that usually leads to more closing deals.
It's way more effective to integrate your CRM with a tool that was explicitly built for your engagement game. It allows revenue leaders to have a pretty in-depth overview of a pipeline with dollars attached to it, while sales reps can focus on the actual nitty-gritty of the engagement.
Outreach - Best if you have a sales team of 50+ people. It can be a bit complicated, but it's mega powerful. Aside from the issues with Salesforce connectivity (which I believe is on SFDC's side), it's a great sales software with a ton of features. That's why we decided not to use it.
Salesloft - Best for startups. Think of it as a more user-friendly Outreach for smaller teams. I found it easier to add new prospects, the dialer seems to load faster, and the historical activity tracking and reporting work better. It's easier overall, which means it's going to save you a lot of time.
Scheduling Tools
In 2023, in the post-COVID world, 85% of sales calls happen online. To value both our time and your customers' time, it's inevitable that you will need a tool to schedule meetings. If you Google it, you will see how many tools are out there that do the exact same thing, so I will just make it simple for you:
Zcal - If you need to stay cheap, it's free and it works well.
If you want a reliable choice with lots of integrations, get Calendly.
That's it. Very simple.
Sales Analytics & Reporting
This is the most overlooked topic by many sales teams. And it's not because they don't understand the value of it but rather the complexity of setup. You usually can't do this by yourself if you're non-technical, so it might be tempting to skip this step. Do not. Many sales teams fail because they don't have the right analytics in place.
Usually, different analytics tools serve different purposes, and it also varies from industry to industry. So if your only current reporting and analytics solution is Excel, here's a breakdown of tools you might consider to stay accountable and track the sales activities happening in your sales funnel:
Mixpanel - the #1 digital product analytics. If you have a web app or a website with heavy traffic, Mixpanel would be the best choice. The main alternatives are Fullstory, but it gets very expensive, and Amplitude, which is more complicated than Mixpanel but offers some more flexibility that I never found useful.
Google Analytics - a go-to for your website user analytics if you want to know some free basic information about your conversion rates and also not bad to set up advertisement retargeting campaigns.
Other than that, it became really crappy with the last update (now it's Google Analytics 4, and it was Universal Analytics before that), where Google is trying to upsell Bigquery to their analytics users, which is just an extra layer of complexity.
So, if you need more than basic information from your website, just adding Mixpanel will take this hassle off your shoulders.
PowerBI or Tableau - if you have a LOT of data to analyze stored in your database, then having a BI tool could be a game-changer, while also saving you from over-utilizing spreadsheets. You will need to ask your engineers to set this up or hire a consultant and then invest in training for your team and yourself.
PopSQL - a SQL client if you are familiar with SQL and know how to run queries. It's a simple but effective tool to pull up information directly from your database.
Datalynx - if you want a plug-and-play solution. After you integrate it with your CRM and database, you will be able to ask questions using plain English.
Think of it as a company AI data analyst that knows your data. It's especially helpful for sales leaders and sales managers to identify actionable insights and monitor their team's perfomance.
Sales Automation
As I mentioned earlier, when you go down the route of specialized tools rather than generalists, it's important to automate and integrate your environment. Otherwise, the sales process will become too complicated to manage and make your team unhappy and stressed.
It's a good idea to have somebody in sales ops managing all the automation for you. For example, if you do some sales engagement outside of your CRM, it should all be tracked by your CRM automatically and then flow right into your reporting software.
While 90% of the tools I mentioned integrate between each other pretty seamlessly, often it's not enough. Here are the only two other tools you should have to automate hundreds of repetitive tasks in your sales team:
Zapier if you want a stress-free, foolproof tool that will allow you to integrate all the sales stack together. I've tried tens of alternatives, and it's simply the best for now. Simple to navigate, minimum up-front learning, and solves 90% of automation tasks.
N8N if you need to stay cheap and are more technical. It's also more advanced but at the cost of higher complexity. So if the budget is your concern and you don't mind figuring out how automation works at a deeper level, N8N is a great choice. That's what we ended up using, but only because we have a pretty technical sales team.
Leads Sourcing
Inbound is king, we all know that. But outbound still works. And even for inbound, you usually want to know as much contact information as possible about every potential customer, who signed up for a demo (please don't make it a struggle and ask 50 questions to qualify somebody).
When it comes to lead generation, as you can already assume with any other sales tech out there, everyone has a #1 sales intelligence tool to find new leads. Here's what I found works the best:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Evaboot if you trust LinkedIn to get leads and have a shoestring budget. It's the cheapest way to get many decent quality leads. Yet, I found the LinkedIn Sales Nav becomes less and less reliable with a crazy amount of fake profiles and honestly pretty wonky filtering that often gives you incorrect results.
Apollo is another good software if you have some more budget in place. It has good leads and can also help you with lead scoring and inbound leads enrichment (and even prospecting). In other words, the only thing it lacks is the quality of the leads compared to some more expensive software. Aside from that, it's a decent choice.
Zoominfo if you need the best leads and can afford it - definitely go for it. I haven't seen any tool yet (aside from custom scripts that your engineers can write specifically for your request) that will have more qualified leads than Zoominfo does.
So yes, when it usually costs you 2 times more than Apollo, it's definitely worth it, especially if you prioritize quality over quantity.
Lessons Learned
Navigating through the vast sea of sales tech was no small feat. Early on, it became evident that not every shiny tool was a golden ticket. We were, in many ways, kids in a candy store. We got excited by every new tool and feature, but not all were meant for us.
Here's what we learned from this part of our journey:
Avoid Tool Overload: Just because there's a new tool out there doesn't mean it's right for your business. I had my moments, diving deep into the functionalities of tools, only to realize that they weren’t a good fit. It's essential to understand the real needs of your business first.
Integration is King: A tool might be stellar on its own but if it doesn’t gel well with your existing stack, it might be more of a dragging force. We learned this the hard way. A seamlessly integrated tech environment is not just efficient but it also keeps the morale of the team high.
Investment vs. ROI: Just because a tool is expensive doesn’t mean it's the best. Salesforce might be the giant in the CRM space, but for us, the user experience didn't match up to its reputation. It’s all about finding what gives you the best bang for your buck.
Know Your Needs: Startups, especially, need to be careful with their choices. With limited resources and often high burn-rate, the key is to pick tools that align perfectly with the business size and needs. For instance, Hubspot might be a great for many, but at the same time it might be overkill for your team.
Trust but Verify: Recommendations are great, but nothing beats firsthand experience. I often found myself following the popular opinion, only to realize that the popular doesn’t mean applicable. It’s essential to take every piece of advice with a pinch of salt and give it a shot yourself.
Conclusion
To wrap up, the journey from being overwhelmed by the gazillion of tech tools to finally setting up an efficient sales tech stack was both challenging and exciting. In the fast-paced world of sales, where every second counts, the right tools can be a game-changer. Our sales figures, post the sales overhaul proves this very well.
For companies getting on the same journey, here's my two cents: It's not about having the most tools but the right ones. It's not about being state-of-the-art but about being efficient and effective.
As we learned, sometimes the difference between success and failure isn't just hard work, but working smart. And in today's world, working smart often means investing in the right sales tech stack.
So, dive in, experiment, learn, and equip your business with the best tools out there. Your future self will thank you!
Start retrieving the insights in your own language
Think about the last time you had a question about your data. How long did it take to answer it?
Start retrieving the insights in your own language
Think about the last time you had a question about your data. How long did it take to answer it?
Start retrieving the insights in your own language
Think about the last time you had a question about your data. How long did it take to answer it?