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Your sales stack is the backbone of your sales activity. Just as the spine supports the body and enables flexibility and strength, a well-integrated sales tech stack supports your sales team, offering the structure and support needed to succeed. Your stack isn't just a random collection of tools; it's the central support system that informs and coordinates your team's efforts, from lead generation to deal closure, it's the synchronized system that orchestrates your team’s efforts, ensuring smooth operation and peak performance. Here's your guide to constructing a sales tech stack that stands tall and can support you all the way to $10M in sales.
So what is a Sales Stack?
A sales stack is the collection of tools and tech that your sales team uses to generate leads store contact data, build proposals, get signatures, and communicate effectively both with your team and with your customers.
The best sales stack is made up of sales tools that integrate seamlessly together, meaning your team can access the features and information they need seamlessly.
The use cases of a typical sales tech stack include:
a tech stack purpose-built to meet your organization’s needs drives a host of benefits, including:
If you build it, the sales reps will use it, right?
Wrong.
Building a sales stack isn’t the same as purchasing a bunch of tools. It’s a bit more complex.
Whether you’re running a startup, SMB or something else entirely if you want to build a sales stack that your team will actually use, structure it around the sales process they’re already using.
A well-defined sales process is what enables sales teams to predictably close deals. The tools you purchase should power your sales process into something that can be done more efficiently and more productively and at scale.
So, before you even consider adding new tools to your belt, make sure you have a clearly defined process. Don’t worry, I already wrote about what that looks like here.
Once you have a clear view on your process, you can build a sales stack that functions inside the system you already have in place.
So, which tools should be part of your sales stack?
Apollo is my favourite outreach tool - it combines lead research capabilities (ie finding decision makers and their contact details including emails and phone numbers) with outbound sequence automation across email, phone, linkedin. It does all this with a fantastic UX, best in class IMO.. And of course, you can leverage the AI writing tool which is coming along in leaps and bounds. Their documentation and support is bang on, with great resources for writing our outbound as well.
You can build a *seriously* powerful outbound machine with Apollo which can run 100% hands-free.
This is my paid referral link, because even hardworking fractionals need to eat. Just go, sign up.
https://apollo.partnerlinks.io/kpqm5yvq7deh
Costs: plans start from $49 a month.
I know, I know, it’s linkedin. It hasn’t really been updated in a decade. It’s expensive. It has no real competitors though and it’s still where everyone goes to be “humbled, excited, thrilled” etc etc.
It does allow you to boost your LinkedIn selling strategy though, which for most of us in B2B is your social selling.
It starts with the advanced lead and company search: Using specific criteria, you can narrow down your search results to the prospects that are best qualified for your business. Once you start adding prospects to your lists, LinkedIn will add lead recommendations, helping you discover new leads automatically.
When you purchase the Sales Navigator, you’ll also get access to an expanded list of who’s viewed your profile, InMail messages, and real-time updates about your prospects in your notifications feed.
Cost: Plans start at $99 per month.
Loom is one of those products you can never go back from. It’s async video communications that allows you to screenshare as well as record your face. From internal comms to customer support it has taken over. It’s criminally underused in sales though and the ability to inject warmth, humanity and persona into demos, follow-ups, objection handling, cold emails and the versatility is well worth the sticker price.
Loom makes internal and external communication much more personal and helps remote teams power through customer conversations.
Cost: Free, or paid plans start at $12.5 per month.
I know, I know, I am a huge automation nerd but when you start scaling and you want systems to talk to each other or actions to happen automagically then nocode automation tools are your best friend.
If you want to add people from a CRM to your marketing stack. Or add a message to slack when a prospect stage changes. Update admin details. Send contract renewals to clients. The world is your oyster here.
There are two options really - Zapier (simple to use with dropdown boxes for simple folk like me) and Make (which is more flexible, powerful and smart nocoders eventually move to, people who know how to use APIs etc).
For most of us it’s tomato/tomato.
Ps Airtable and Sheets also have automation capabilities that are rapidly expanding.
Pricing:
Zapier - has a free tier, only good as a sandbox really. Starter is US$29.99
Make - more complicated as it’s usage-based but starts free and the first tier is $9 month.
In the beginning, there was google sheets. Then if you want to step it up a little, you can build something/use a template in airtable.
Once you outgrow these There are only two you need to look at.
Hubspot - this is your everything CRM where you can integrate sales and marketing. Go down this path if you have marketing capabilities that you want to track.
Cost: Free, sort of, but not really useable. Starter price is $20 but it can get pricey real quick as you add in functionality modules..
Pipedrive - this is the sales CRM built by salespeople for salespeople. It’s highly visual, tracks deals beautifully and is incredibly powerful within this sphere. If you are doing high value, direct sales to enterprise, this is your huckleberry.
Pricing: from US $21.90
Special Mentions:
I am currently testing out attio for my own CRM because it came highly recommended from smart people I trust (hi nathan, alexandre) and because yes, i am a tech nerd and i like new tools to play with.
Pricing: has a free tier, so good for them.
Say it with me “NO. MORE. POWERPOINT”. Ditto for google slides, which somehow manages to be even worse.
There is no need to use crappy tools like that when Pitch exists. Pitch is just dreamy to use, with things like automated text alignment, image size normalisation and so much more. I describe it as ‘Powerpoint that just works’.
There are beautiful templates you can use, a wonderful community and great documentation.
They have fantastic presentation tools and of cours, AI tools to help write stuff.
Get it, it’s free, and never look back.
Pricing: Free, the paid version has analytics which is cool and starts at US$20.
If you need to upgrade from there, you can look at something like Qwilr for more powerful analytics, and proposal through to contract signing capabilities. I personally haven’t used it much, but people rave about it.
Price: from $35 per month.
This is more of general tool but it’s just so damn good I have to put it in here. Audiopen is an amazing product that will take your rambling voice notes and convert them into beautifully written, coherent notes that you can use wherever.
This is the *perfect* tool for when you walk out of a sales meeting and you want to capture your thoughts perfectly. It also has integrations with Zapier etc so you can have any relevant notes automatically added to your CRM. This is pure AI magic.
Price: free tier, $75 per year for advanced features.
Building the Ultimate Sales Stack for Your Team
So, what have we learned today?
First, your sales stack includes all the tools that maximize your sales process and level-up your team’s productivity in closing deals.
Second, that stack should be adapted to the specific methods and processes that your team already follows to close deals.
Third, the tools in your sales stack should cover 6 specific areas of the sales process:
Is your favorite sales tool not listed here? Let me know in the comments and I’ll consider your case 🙂. I will happily take bribes in the for of swag, I wear a siz M shirt and wil take any size vision Pro 😎😎
