Becoming a high-achieving sales performer is a delicate act of fine-tuning which involves balancing a wide range of variables.

Your need the right leader, the right culture, the right product and market demand.

But your sales performance is also governed by the tools and resources that support your sales activity.

Investment and deployment of new technologies can radically impact goal attainment, while also serving to strengthen engagement and collaboration with your team.

Looking for the right tools to turbo-charge your sales output?

Here are 5 areas to focus on:

1. Make your CRM work harder

CRM platforms are at the heart of any sales activity, recording key information on current and potential customers.

But as well as being a vital repository for tracking data, your CRM can also be configured to actively shape your behaviour and help you to close more deals.

Unlocking the full potential of your CRM to embed best practices throughout the sales cycle takes some thinking, but it’s an investment which can pay huge returns when it comes to sales consistency. It can also be especially effective if you’re new to a sales role and looking to ramp up fast.

Key to the process is monitoring the processes and decision-making of top-performing sales reps and building those into your CRM interface.

From recording initial customer information on a discovery call to sending out proposals, most CRMs include functionality to create new fields, prompts, templates and workflow configurations to guide behaviour.

By creating an in-built blueprint that consolidates the way either you or the most effective salespeople in your team work, you pave the way to replicate that success over and over.

2. Upgrade your mobile solution

Whether inbound or outbound, office-based or in the field, the phone is your most vital tool for connecting with customers and closing deals.

While other areas of sales technology evolve at breakneck pace, most traditional mobile offerings haven’t been updated in over 20 years.

Most sales teams either carry around second ‘work phones’ or use their personal devices for business calls and texts.

Swytch is a cloud-based mobile solution for sales professionals that lets you purchase work mobile and landline numbers for your existing mobile handset, eliminating the need to carry a second phone or use your own number for business.

It lets you use a single device for all your lines, see at a glance whether incoming calls are on your work or personal line, and keeps communication simple and effective.

3. Leverage gamification

With the global gamification market expected to grow at a staggering 36% over the next 10 years, leading sales organisations everywhere are exploring new ways to use technology to bring sales competition and incentives to life.

Gamification is all about tapping into your natural competitive and goal-focused instincts and creating an engaging visualisation of success that helps you track your progress and attainment.

Practical implementations include leaderboards, goal tracking, badges & milestone achievements, team targets and a wealth of other use cases. Providers such as Hoopla, Ambition and Gameffective boast customers from fast-paced startups to established multinationals.

And gamification isn’t just limited to your sales goals – plenty of businesses also adopt the technology in order to incentivise progress towards learning goals, career progression and team collaboration objectives.

4. See who’s checking you out online

As inbound marketing and online content strategies continue to shape the way your company builds visibility with new prospects, it’s more important than ever to have the right software in place to monitor who is actually engaging with your marketing materials and scoping you out online.

Whereas established inbound marketing technology focuses on direct interactions with specific content assets (e.g. whitepaper downloads or video views), tools such as Lead Forensics, Albacross and Whoisvisiting offer a new angle.

By cross-referencing the IP addresses of visitors who view your site with a proprietary database, these and similar platforms give you key information on which businesses have been engaging with your company’s content, and then offer key decision-maker contact information and intel to facilitate follow-up outreach.

With all the hard work you do to get the right eyes on your brand, potentially having premium-tier customers on your site without being able to reach out and start the conversation can mean golden opportunities slip through your fingers unknown.

5. Automate your engagement

Stats abound underlining the importance of follow-up in sales, with data suggesting as little as 2% of sales are generated at an initial meeting.

While the need to keep in touch with customers and patiently move deals through the sales funnel is nothing new, the tools to help you keep multiple plates spinning are more numerous and effective than ever before.
Marketing automation technology helps ensure that the vital steps in keeping prospects engaged aren’t left down to chance, don’t get forgotten, don’t suck up your valuable time and aren’t open to inconsistencies and human error.

General-purpose marketing automation tools such as Adobe-owned Marketo and Oracle’s rival Eloqua have dominated the enterprise space for many years, helping sales teams develop multi-phase sequences that deliver specific content (via email, SMS or other channels) to prospects and active customers at different steps in the buying cycle as defined by ‘triggers’ usually configured within a CRM.

A number of providers, however, focus specifically on the SMB market (such as Drip and ActiveCampaign), while some established platforms such as HubSpot still offer impressive functionality in their lower-grade product versions for growing companies working to a tight budget.