4 Questions to Ask When Buying Sales Tools

When organizations invest in sales tools, it’s certain that they’ll need a CRM – as well as tools that provide analytics about seller-side activities. However, when it comes to emerging sales tools that deliver buyer-side analytics, things can get a little confusing.

To help you get on the right track, take a step back and consider the big picture. Just like breaking a big project into smaller pieces makes it less overwhelming, you can apply a similar approach here. Start by being clear on your desired business value. Then work your way down to the specific functionality required and how that functionality must be delivered to be successful within your organization.

These four performance-based questions can help you cut to the chase:

#1. What problem do you want to solve?

Think about the biggest pain points for your organization. For example, if your priority is to improve responses from prospects, is your challenge:

• Figuring out which content resonates the most with prospects?


• Making content easily accessible to the entire sales team?


• Keeping content current?


• Sharing content findings so messaging can be improved?

Or maybe your priority is improving selling behaviors. Pain points could include onboarding or learning how to sell to different buyers – like millennials.

#2. What level of analytics do you require?

As you look at a sales tool, pay attention to its analytics capabilities. If it delivers transactional analytics, i.e. showing a listing of email opens, is this sufficient for you? Or do you want deeper insights that can paint a more comprehensive picture about how your sales processes and content are working?

New solutions are available today that offer much deeper insights than just reporting email opens. They capture data that can fill key gaps in your understanding about customer engagement and reveal how sales follow-up processes are working. By graphically comparing the performance between different sales emails, for example, tools can show you what approach works best, so it can be repeated on future accounts.

#3. How do I prioritize which tool to purchase first?

With everything coming out today, you could bury your sales team in new sales tools. Prioritize the tools that are most important to your organization by considering where your business needs more support. Tools that accelerate the sales process can increase efficiencies and deliver faster ROI, whereas if you have a lot of new reps, you may prioritize onboarding to speed team productivity.

Also, pay attention to whether a tool can strengthen the customer relationship. At Forrester’s Forum for Sales Enablement last month, analyst Andy Hoar noted that sales reps have been trained to be product-focused, but that must change to a buyer-focused, empathetic, consultative approach. This is vital in today’s ‘Age of the Customer.’ Ask yourself whether a tool helps improve the customer relationship.

#4. Can it support future needs?

As your needs evolve over time, can the tool scale to meet them? Point products, such as email tracking alone, can limit your ability to extend technology capabilities in the future, so you want to be sure to consider a path that can provide for additional functionality.

You want to be sure new tools can be easily integrated with existing tools. Also, many of these tools generate their own data. Can this data be synchronized in your CRM? Can marketing access this data? How easily can teams share findings?

The sales acceleration tools market encompasses many solutions – and they can be confusing! If you’re evaluating tools, you’ll want to ask yourself these key questions to help make sure you’re making the right choice for your business requirements.

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4 Questions to Ask When Buying Sales Tools