Enterprise selling is becoming increasingly complex and collaborative. With multiple client-side stakeholders and in-house teams weighing in on each deal, it’s never been more important to have the right tools and processes in place.

Another change is also happening on the human side of things. The average sales rep is trained to work as an individual contributor, but they are increasingly required to delve into project management for each account.

Their roles are expanding to include not just selling, but also onboarding and offering after-sales support to each client. All this work can strain available resources on sales teams.

On top of that, sales organizations today lack effective collaboration and hybrid work capabilities to keep up. And without the right approach to choosing the best tooling, it’s easy to miss the mark and sink time, money, and effort into an inefficient sales workflow.

Let’s explore tooling in a bit more detail.

How to choose the best sales tooling for your B2B team

There are certain sales tool categories that sales leaders should consider when building out their stack. In no particular order, these are the few that I think are important for success:

1. CRM tool: A CRM tool is crucial for collecting and managing your customer data in one place - especially as a small business looking to ramp up lead generation and sales acceleration. Chosen correctly, your CRM tool can unlock previously unseen opportunities for your sales and marketing team to reach out to cold leads, upsell existing buyers, and filter out time-wasters from your pipeline. Check out our guide on how to choose the best CRM for your company.
2. Sales prospecting tools and cold outreach automation: Reaching out to cold leads can drive success for your business, but doing it manually can be a massive time-suck for your sales reps. Sales automation tools like Snov.io, Reply.io, and Hunter.io can help you automate these activities, freeing up more time for every sales professional on your team. You can also use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to speed up the process and fill your CRM even faster. Check out review sites like G2 and Capterra for more sales prospecting tools.
3. Video calling, note-taking, and call recording: In a world of virtual selling and remote work, you need the right tools to power business operations across long distances. You probably already use the basics - Zoom, Meet, or Teams - but consider upgrading your subscription to allow for enhanced functionality like longer meetings, more participants, and recording transcripts.
4. Sales call analytics: You’re making calls all day - but are you tracking how well your salespeople are doing on those calls? What objections do they keep coming up against, and which messaging consistently converts customers? That’s where a sales call analytics tool comes in handy. Such tools give you insight into what’s working and what you need to improve on your sales calls. Consider adding sales intelligence tools like Gong and Chorus to your stack to gain an edge over your competitors.
5. Project management and remote collaboration: You’ll need a way to track all your project deliverables and deadlines. Consider using tools like Asana, monday.com, Zoho, and Pipefy for faster workflow automation.

The above are just a few categories of sales productivity tools to consider for your stack. There are others, of course - tools to improve your sales enablement, social media marketing automation, and others - but these five categories are a great place to start.

There are a few considerations to make when choosing the best sales productivity tools for your team. Let’s look at that next.

Top 4 criteria for choosing a sales tool

Sales Ops and RevOps teams can struggle to keep up with growth, and being strategic and proactive about your sales infrastructure can help ensure that software is not an obstacle for your team.

When it comes to sales tooling, you’ll never lack options. But app bloat is a thing, and as a sales leader, you want to be thoughtful about which tools you bring on board and how frictionless the user experience will be.

Here’s what to keep in mind when choosing the best sales tool for the job:

1. How much does it cost? I’m not just talking about the upfront fee of the tool. Are there add-ons you might need later? Will you be able to handle increased pricing as your team scales if you’re paying per seat? Are there any renewal or cancellation fees?
2. Who is it built for? A tool that’s built for use by executives will differ vastly from one that’s built for a sales engineer on the ground floor. Picking the wrong tool leads to poor adoption and wasted money.
3. What integrations does it offer? As you add more tools to your sales stack, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that these tools can talk to each other. A Salesforce integration with Slack, Google Drive, and Asana results in increased efficiency for your sales team, compared to a siloed third-party tool.
4. How much coding will it involve? Sales tooling is an incredibly opinionated space, with every company preferring to do things differently and build packaged products to support everyone effectively. No-code and low-code platforms allow sales teams to build their own flavor on top of the tools they already use, delivering a more relevant and impactful solution to their needs.

Towards an integrated, collaborative future

The digital workplace is here to stay. As we settle into this new reality, sales leaders must build long-lasting strategies to onboard sales reps effectively and enable them to close deals in an organized way.

The smartest sales leaders of tomorrow understand that integrations, cost-effectiveness, easy maintenance, collaboration, and a bottoms-up approach to sales tooling are the keys to success in the enterprise sales cycle. Gone will be the bloated, expensive, and siloed tools of yesteryear.

And when it comes to custom-coded solutions vs. no-code sales tools, the latter will win - bringing unparalleled ease of doing sales to B2B teams everywhere. That’s the horse we’re betting on, and the reason we built Momentum to begin with.

Momentum is a no-code collaborative sales tool that syncs your Salesforce data into Slack to speed up your workflow. This lowers data access friction for your sales team and is the perfect addition to your sales stack. See how Momentum helps you close more deals, faster.