The ever growing Sales Technology Landscape (Sales Tech Stack) 2018

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Nicolas De Kouchkovsky of CaCube Consulting just published the 2018 version of the now famous Sales Technology Landscape which features 830 vendors across 38 categories. If you are responsible for the selection of sales tools for your organisation, I can only sympathise with you on the task ahead.

Sales Pipeline Management

As we started UnifiedVU by building a highly visual Sales Pipeline View on top of CapsuleCRM, this market segment caught my eye first on the sales landscape. From those listed, we already support CapsuleCRM, Pipedrive, HubSpot, SugarCRM and Salesforce CRM.

Whilst there has been consolidation in other areas, we have not yet seen consolidation at sales pipeline management segment. Perhaps this is due to the high level of fragmentation in the market place as well as due to the ease at which new vendors can enter the market, e.g. Salesflare.

Data Visualisation

I’m gobsmacked to see UnifiedVU appearing in data visualisation market segment with other notable companies such as Domo.

“Made in Manchester”

UnifiedVU is being built in Manchester, UK and it’s a proud moment to see few of our neighbours making it to the landscape with us, these being: CapsuleCRM and ResponseTap. Quite a few companies who should have been featured are clearly missing, e.g. Circle Loop.

Cost of Sales Tech Stack

In the past, I argued that the cost of your sales tools per person for a mid market company should not go over $500. But today, that looks impossible given the breadth of the functionality available.

Sales Technology Blue Print

Given the complexity of the Sales Stack, Nicolas has tried to simplify it by producing a blue print that anyone can use. You do not need to buy a product to meet each of the segments. You could start with the major ones and then expand as your sales organisation grows, bearing in mind the need for periodic review and reduction of the number of solutions used.

The Basic Building Blocks of Sales

So what are the basic building blocks? I would start with the following:
  1. A list of prospects
  2. A method of qualification
  3. Sales intelligence
  4. Inside or outbound sales team
  5. Sales collateral
  6. Proposals to contract negotiation
  7. Sales analytics
  8. Creation of case studies for future sales

Whilst any growing organisation needs a CRM these days to satisfy (1), the usage of spreadsheets within the mid market as well as large organisations is still very high. UnifiedVU could easily be adopted to bring life to spreadsheets similar to how we enrich CRMs with Prospect 360º View.

How you qualify leads depends on many factors. It’s easier if you have few buyer personas than many when it comes to qualifying. If your CRM allows tags, then we can perform wonders via UnifiedVU.

 

 

For (3) and specially for UK based prospects, we have built sales intelligence view combining CRM, social profiles via FullContact, company house records, location via google maps, bog posts via RSS and tweets. If its a upsell or a resell, we can also bring your past correspondence, invoice details, etc to make decision making easier.

UnifiedVU could also play a significant role in supporting (4) to (8) alongside your sales tech stack.

Accompanying above building blocks would be your vital tool kit, which is not unique to sales. These being:

  • Email
  • Voice
  • Chat/messaging
  • Social
  • In-person
  • File storage
  • Collaboration

You don’t need to purchase separate tools for above. Company wide tools should suffice in most cases.

If you need any help choosing your sales stack or how to unify or integrate tools, do get in touch.